Russell-Scott-Emery

So draft one is complete, and the sculpting of draft two is underway.  Having shocked myself that I have actually managed to get this far, the learning curve is still steep. There are huge swathes of passages where I actually don't like the style of writing, so the correction of that feels a bit like psychological sculpting of my words. Some elements of my abandoned first opening three chapters still haunt part of the text, so that has required editing.  Adding subjectivity to describing paragraphs seems to have taken up a lot of the last couple of days. I've also realised that where I am dealing with three orphans as the main leads, I have no inner dialogue about abandonment, being adopted or any of the other usual "family" hang-ups one would associate with an orphan.  So this is being addressed where it is appropriate to do so. I keep getting ideas for book two, so I am having to reign myself in and focus on the book in hand.  It's rewarding to...

So having had a serious bout of writer's block, my friends Remi and Samme finally got me motivated to attack the last four chapters of the youth novel, Figmentasia: The Quest for Truth. "Just keep writing - write anything, but write something," Remi said to me.  I remembered that my initial target was to write a minimum of 786 words every other day.  If I did this then I could have a complete first draft done in no time. And so on Tuesday, I sat at the computer, allocated an hour and said to myself I would write.  The plot points were mapped out, all I had to do was write. Fear of writing a chapter that had to have both a lot of character development, and also magic training had taken over me.  As Samme pointed out, I'd come too far not to finish now.  So here I am - writing again and trying to find my rhythm again.  If there's any advice I would pass on to someone who is starting out on their first novel like me, then it would be to do just t...