The first draft of ‘The Spearhead of Creation: A Sean Livingstone Adventure Book 3’ is now complete. Well, I actually finished it a week ago but it took me a few days to decompress. Phew!
For those of you interested in writing your own books, it took me 94 days to write the first draft, based on the outline I created in Microsoft Excel. You can read more on my article about that here. Those 94 days were spread across 22 weeks. I mostly took weekends off and had the Easter holidays and a couple of other things come up that interrupted my weekly writing routine.
The word count has come in at 99,339 words, which is right where I was hoping to land. That means I averaged 1056 words a day. Some days were only a few-hundred words, while others were in the thousands. I’m no Chris Fox in regards to speed, but this is the quickest book I’ve written so far. Writing speed is something I’m certainly keeping track of now and hoping to build upon with each new book. Chris has some great techniques on increasing speed while keeping up the quality. I highly recommend checking him out if you’re an aspiring writer, especially his book 5,000 Words Per Hour: Write Faster, Write Smarter.
If you’re wondering how my initial outline worked out, then I’m pleased to say it did a lot of the heavy lifting. I followed it closely for the first two thirds of the book, but had to adjust it for the third and final act. I stopped writing chapters for a few days to revisit the outline and adjust the plot. Normally, this is what you’d call a classic case of writer’s block. But the benefit of working from an outline is that it’s easy to get in and adjust things before writing yourself into a bigger problem. Once I’d identified and fixed the issues holding me up it was a race to the end.
Since starting this book I’ve begun looking at another writing program called Scrivener. I’m so used to using Microsoft Word and Excel I’m not sure I’m ready to make the change, but I know a lot of authors use it to combine their plotting, character development, and writing of the actual manuscript. In theory it looks good, but putting it into practice is another thing.
I’m now writing a prequel novella for the Sean Livingstone series, which I’ll be giving away as a permanent freebie. This story will be a lead up to the events in book one, Crown of the Pharaohs.
Keep checking my site for more info on both of these new releases. I can’t wait to share them with you. But for now, it’s back to the writing!