So many ideas... so little oomph!

Some of you may be aware that I have a favourite bridge. Well, this is another picture of it, taken from a completely different angle to all the others I've posted.

On Friday, a friend dragged me away from my WIP for a walk. I think it helped, because when I got home I zoomed through the rest of the re-writes and wrote 'The End' on Sunday!

I didn't make quite as many changes as I thought I would - if you read my post The Ending you'll understand what I'm referring to - but I did correct things that weren't right. For example - trying to not give the end away - I killed a few people off by shooting them, but completely forgot that I'd also set a fire going and that wasn't affecting anyone. I also realised that I'd actually killed off more people than were actually involved in the scene and had more people escaping!

So, after unkilling a few people, and making the fire bigger, I think the scene works a bit better. I'm still unsure about the very last chapter - have I gone far enough? Should I make it more blatant? Would that be out of step with the rest of the story so far?

For some reason though - despite having ideas for two new stories and needing to get the novel ready for some possible readers - I'm lacking the oomph:

• It's too hot
• Cat and The Dreamer has just slid down under the one million mark in the rankings (actually a vertical drop on the lovely Amazon Central chart I checked)
• I'm getting far too negative for my own good.

Here's another picture from my walk last week,

just so I don't finish this post on a downer.

The challenge sign-up is here!

It's time to sign up to this amazing blogging challenge. Can you write a post for every letter of the alphabet? Do you want to try? If so, click on the logo and do it - go on, you know you want to!

I've done it. It's my first time, so I'm not quite sure how I'll manage -  seeing as though, less than 2 years into my blog, I don't have a schedule for posting and tend to just do a random splurge of thoughts whenever I want. I'm really looking forward to it, and to discovering lots of new blogs and bloggers!





In other news: I survived January! It helped that I was able to distract myself by planning a birthday meal for my mum, which we all enjoyed last night, even though the table was booked absurdly early because it was a school night, and we were the only people in quite a large pub. We were having so much fun, we didn't even notice that until we left!

I'm awaiting the final edits for Cat and the Dreamer, and seeing the cover for the first time. I've pretty much finished a trilogy of novellas, which I'm hoping will be ready for submission in a couple of weeks - it only really needs a last read-through for those silly mistakes that always creep in. I'm still hoping I can make one of the stories longer as it's come in at under 10,000 words.

And, finally, I've retrieved the folder with my novel inside from the bottom of a pile to the top of it, in the hope that I'll feel inspired to read it soon - and therefore be inspired to have a good redraft with my trusty red pen.

Happy February!

Finishing one story/starting another

I thought it was about time I wrote about some of the good stuff about writing. I'm concerned you all think I'm pulling my hair out all the time, and I'm not... I'm really not.

Today's Really Good Thing is that I finished a story that I wasn't sure I'd ever finish. I've been mentioning it for a while, possibly on this blog, definitely on Facebook (the premonition story). I was writing it in a very ad hoc way, which meant when I wrote the last sentence and decided I ought to read it all the way through I was a little apprehensive. I've been writing from a chopped up story (the original is twice as long!), cutting and pasting key paragraphs - I was literally cutting with scissors and sticking paragraphs together with cellotape (I'm at the cutting edge of technology, me). I was a little worried that I'd used the same paragraphs in several different places... and I haven't. Phew, the relief! I'll leave it for a couple of days then maybe print it out and read it from the page.

Because the story is now half as long as it used to be, I'm searching for ideas for another story to make up the word count for the collection. I've got several stories lurking in a filing cabinet that haven't seen the light for a good few years - I'm so wrung out from this current story, I haven't got the strength to start anything from scratch. A couple of these old stories are very weird indeed, but that kind of suits the way the collection is going, so tomorrow - after the gym and before work - I'll grab my huge sheaf of muddled up pages, curl up on the settee and see if I can't make a jolly good story!