Days 25 & 26
A quarter of the way through and still no discernible daily pattern worries me slightly.  I had thought I would manage to fall into a set way of working. Make a mental note to worry about it later then spend an enormous amount of time creating the trailer for the new novella.

Emails fly backwards and forwards with half finished versions of visuals (that I’m doing) and music (done by Bobby’s Beard) and in the end this is the result.

Days 27-29
Editing.  Lots of editing. Or rather not enough editing. Had several busy days with work so I didn’t really have a great deal of time each day and only managed to squeeze in half an hour on each one.

The good news was that in the process I managed to tie up the loose ends from the previous draft I had spotted so now all I need to do is one last read through, minor tweaks and then I’m done and can prepare for the launch…

Quite excited actually.

Day Nineteen

And then I got on a bit of a roll and finished chapters thirteen and fourteen as well. Add in the prologue which was chapter zero and that was fifteen chapters complete.  A first draft weighing in at 17,000 odd words and the longest piece of writing I have actually completed.

Although I have written longer stuff before I don’t think it really counts because it eventually ran aground and this one has an end so hurray! Very pleased with myself.

Day Twenty
The editing begins.  I decide to take a 3 draft approach. With the first draft finished I will make sure there are no glaring errors of plot, grammar and spelling in it and then, once corrected I will label it ’2nd draft’ and then go through with a fine tooth comb for all the minor bits and bobs for a final 3rd draft. God, editing is boring.

Day Twenty One
Got bored of editing, only managed two chapters so decided to get the cover done.  Already had some ideas and worked them up into the image you can see to the right of this post.

Day Twenty Two
No more distractions. Got down to editing some more. Made good progress. Got distracted by a musician friend getting in contact and offering to do the soundtrack to the trailers that I’m going to make for the book.

Day Twenty Three
Finished the second draft edits on paper. Made some notes as to what else needs doing in order to make sure the whole thing is tied up in a neat little bow.  Was really thinking about the music for the trailers though.

Day Twenty Four
Typed up all the edits that had been made on paper. A task even more boring than editing. I think I need a secretary.

Anyone want to do it? It’s an unpaid, thankless job. No?

Okay then, see you next week for more.

Day Twelve
Was a bit of a non-starter I’m afraid.  Got my head down for half an hour and made a very small amount of progress on chapter 10 of the novella. Gave up in disgust.

Day Thirteen
Got a second wind and completed chapter ten.  Was extremely pleased with myself.  And then I realised that I had accidentally written the chapter wrong.  I had put the characters in the wrong location and chapter eleven hinged on the fact that they were somewhere else.

So I rewrote the entire second half of the chapter.  Didn’t mind too much because after I finished doing that it felt like it hung together a lot better than it had previously.

Day Fourteen
Structurally when I was plotting out ‘Cat Chaser’ I decided to have a similar structure to American TV dramas so you would have a before-the-credits scene, Act One, Act Two, Act Three, Act Four and then the wind-down scene at the end.

Except I won’t have any adverts.

When I’ve been writing I’ve been trying to do as little editing as possible and just concentrate on getting the first major draft done.  Having said that some light editing is definitely required and as a result as I complete each act I have been going through and just checking for major issues and grammar-wrongs.

So I spent day fourteen editing Act Three and I was glad I did since I had inadvertently switched the names of two of the minor characters. That sorted I went to bed wanting to write not edit.

Day Fifteen
Made a start on chapter eleven as spent a small amount of time tinkering with the cover that the novella will ultimately have. Pretty much decided how it will look, now I just need to actually produce the artwork.

Day Sixteen
Got up early and wrote solidly to finish chapter 11 but started to get a niggly paranoia that it wasn’t all hanging together correctly. Gave up.

Day Seventeen
Was really, really tired after not getting much sleep. Feeling of the whole thing not really working was still there but did some work on chapter twelve. Very little real progress was made.

Day Eighteen (still in progress)
Spent some time earlier and I think my worries were unfounded. I’m not saying that there won’t be edits but I think it is hanging together after all. Ploughed through a good chunk of chapter twelve and hopefully going to finish it after lunch if I can grab some time.

Update – chapter twelve finished.  Quite pleased with how it turned out as well.  Although obviously haven’t read it back yet…

Oh and it’s my monthly writers’ group this evening so looking forward to reading some of the thing aloud and seeing what reaction it gets.

Just remembered one last thing! Don’t forget you can still vote for the cover of the new writing prompts books here. Thank you

The setback first, I think.  Well, not exactly a setback as such, more a miscalculation.  I’ve been happily saying on Twitter and probably on these hallowed pages that I’ve finished chapter whateveritis out of 12 of the new novella.

Well something began to dawn on me and that was that the outline I had written actually contained 15 chapters.  Not 12.

The bad news for me is that there is more to do.  The good news is that the story would never had been tied up in only 12 chapters.  Every cloud and all that.

So days ten and eleven of my one hundred days of writing have actually consisted of the completion of chapter 9 (of 15) and I’ve gone through chapters 5, 6 and 7 and done a bit of editing.  Just basic stuff like, oh, I’d got the names of two of the minor characters mixed up in two of the chapters.

Erm.  It’s an easier mistake to make than you would imagine.  I swear.  But anyway it’s fixed now so stop talking about it already.

Also started a bit of a blog post about fictions past.  But that will be later in the week I think.

See you soon.

Day Eight started with the best of intentions, as most days do, but things rapidly descended into chaos.  Whilst mucking around on Twitter I realised that some of the shortened URL’s in the social networking links at the bottom of every page of this site were being classed as spam by the site that provided them.  And this, in spite of the fact that I was doing everything by the book.

Result?  No writing for me as I spend the time I had allocated to writing in fixing the problem and using another, hopefully slightly more reliable provider.  As you can imagine I was somewhat miffed by this but these things happen from time to time so I suppose that is that.

Day Nine I was absolutely convinced I would really write actual prose and – unbelievably – I actually managed it, completing the eighth chapter of ‘Cat Chaser’ in the process.  Only four more to go.

Four more chapters, not four more cats.

As if that wasn’t enough I also got an email from the incredibly talented Rosalind Wyllie sending the last of her contributions to the forthcoming prompts book (vote for the cover here).

And that was day nine.  See you on Monday for day ten.

So, as I promised yesterday, for day seven of one hundred days of writing I did some more work on the covers and here they are ready for you to  look at.

For those of you who weren’t aware the writing prompts on the website are not just going to get an upgrade online but I am also going to be putting out a book of prompts and essays on how to develop the prompts into whatever form you write in whether it be short stories, script, novel or anything else.

The book is going to be available as an ebook as well as in print and will be called ‘Mr Maxwell’s Spectacular Story Suggester‘ and as you can see I’ve been doing designs for the cover. All I want you to do is tell me which one you like the best using this nifty voting machine:

** UPDATE : VOTING HAS NOW CLOSED **

Of course I still need to do a bit of polishing and tweaking whichever one is chosen but I’m sure you’ll get the idea.

What do you think?

None.

Well, except this post.

To become a writer on the fabulous internets you must unlearned what you have learned. You must see through the idea that being a writer is all about writing and you must see that what I did do is just as important and so it counts towards the 100 days of writing. Today my time as a writer was spent working on the design for the cover of the new writing prompts book ‘Mr Maxwell’s Spectacular Story Suggester’. Because, dear reader, I don’t just write all the content for the website, I do every bloody other thing as well and today that means new designs.

Prior to the #100days endeavour I’d done one version of the cover but I wasn’t 100% sure about it so today I did a couple of additional variations to see if they’d be any better. And they were.  So it was time well spent I’d say.

I’ll probably give them another whirl tomorrow then I’ll post them so you can tell me what you think if you are very well behaved.

And so today I sat down before I started work and I wrote.  It was much easier to do it that way.  This evening I might sit down and do a bit more but I might not.  I finally got around to watching series two of Dollhouse and tonight’s the finale so more than likely I’ll be watching that instead.

Still not bad progress at all.  Finished another chapter of the new Defective Detective.  Following the first episode’s ‘found’ title, this episode will be entitled ‘Cat Chaser’.  Today saw the completion of chapter seven, so only five left to write. Finding it a lot easier to move forward on it with the outline I wrote in the first place too.

See you tomorrow.

I managed nearly five hundred words on the next chapter of the novella but real life reared its head and got in the way of achieving anything else. I think what I’ve taken from this week is that I need to try to set aside a portion of the day to do the writing and make it at the same time every day.

Oh and only to concentrate on one thing every day.

I don’t feel too bad because after posting yesterday I did a bit of rewriting of the previous chapter on a couple of plot points I hadn’t quite got right but today has been a work day and not a writing day.

Why not join me for day five starting Monday and start writing yourself for 100 days?

Now, I’m a latecomer to this party.  Another author recommended the idea to me but at the time I wasn’t really sure.  And then I did some research and realised that it wasn’t just an area where I could get my stories ‘out there’ but there were also communities of other writers to interact with.

There are others but the two I chose to concentrate on were Feedbooks and Smashwords and I’ve now put out 3 ebooks on each of these:

Dial M for Monkey was my first collection of short stories and flash fiction.
Dial M on Feedbooks has been downloaded almost 6000 times in just over 6 months which I am absolutely astounded by.
Dial M on Smashwords has done relatively well with 337 downloads which is still good in my book but in comparison with Feedbooks…

The Night Before The Christmas Before I Was Married & other festive tales was a much shorter collection of short stories and flash fiction I put out in December and, unsurprisingly, Christmas-themed.
Christmas on Feedbooks has been downloaded almost 3000 times and strangely has not tailed off as much as I would have expected post-Xmas.
Christmas on Smashwords has managed 339 downloads.

The Defective Detective : Murder on the Links which is a short novella/long short story and episode one of a series I’m working on (currently episode two is 50% done and is going to be a novella)
Murder on Feedbooks has been downloaded nearly 2500 times since mid-February.
Murder on Smashwords has only managed 66 downloads.

So what do I make of that?  Well, to take each in turn.

Feedbooks looks great, it’s easier to navigate, easier to publish and the end result that’s generated is far superior to those generated by Smashwords.  The recent addition of analytics meaning that authors can see how many downloads they’re receving and in what format is just amazing and when you put out an ebook you aren’t fighting for space on the website so you tend to get seen and people will try you out as a result.  Add this to the OPDS and mobile versions of the site and you wind up with a pretty impressive package for author and reader alike.

Smashwords doesn’t look great, you’re fighting for space on the site with an enormous number of other authors so your exposure is strictly limited (which probably goes some way to explaining the disparity between download numbers mention above).  Putting together the book itself can be something of a pain and the end result does not look as good as its Feedbooks counterpart.  Where Smashwords comes into its own is its ability to offer ebooks for sale (all of my ebooks were free except Murder on the Links on Smashwords which was ‘Pay What You Like’) and not only that but they have deals with:

Barnes & Noble – you can see all the books listed here.
Sony (apparently – mine still have yet to appear)
Kobo – see them here
Amazon – couldn’t find them, maybe you’ll have better luck.
Apple – erm… I guess you can access via your iPhone or iPad…

So who’s the winner?  To be perfectly honest I would recommend you put your writing on both.  They both have something to offer the ebook writer and my future releases will definitely be done on both but if you had to make me choose?

It would be Feedbooks.

What do you think?