Willpower & Chapter Five

My first novel, Sign of the Times - already out on Amazon - http://amzn.to/GKqZGd.

I am a morning person. I know many writers like to write at night (this is also possibly due to time constraints, jobs, young and not so young families etc), but I am best in the morning. So, I absolutely should not have put my writing off until this afternoon, particularly as I am prone to post-lunch slumps.  Anyway, the excellent news I have now discovered about having a blog, is it makes you write. I feel I will be letting my followers (albeit currently you are few) down, if I don't post something.  I have just bashed 1000 words out before allowing myself to have dinner.  Maybe this is an enforced diet? And I hope to continue after dinner. So, today's lesson learned - write before noon. Or at least start...  I started Chapter Five this evening.  I knew roughly what I wanted to start off with and I know roughly where I want to get up to (tonight), but then I will have to think about tomorrow's chapter/words.  Touch wood, I am not short of ideas.  My issue has been making the time to put them on paper and that I am doing.  A creative writing teacher once told me 'just write', so I did and that's how Sign of the Times was originally three times the length it is now! Of course there is the edit, but to lose 2/3 - that was hard.  And all to meet publishing criteria.  That is the joy of Kindle and other ebooks. Of course you still want to have your prose and story and plotlines as tight as possible, but you don't have to have it at 120K words.  If your story needs 150K or needs to be as mighty a tome as Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (a fabulous and weird book), so be it.  Tonight, I found myself scrolling back up to check that I didn't have any continuity errors, given that I wrote the first two chapters nearly three years ago.I can't have me saying a character can't cook to save her life, yet earlier mentioned she was a Michelin starred chef now, can I?!  I generally like to do my research as I go along, so if I am painting a picture of a place, or have it in my head, I need to check if those buildings are Georgian, Victorian or whatever.  Right, food beckons - until tomorrow, Sooz