Diary of a pocket novel – back on track

It’s been a long time since I did any new work on the pocket novel. Mostly I’ve been doing other stuff, stuff that pays my wages. But there were a couple of other issues too.

The first one was when Ulverscroft announced that they’re no longer publishing the mystery imprint of their large print books. This is a blow, because the large print version does bring in extra cash.

First there is the initial payment, and then there’s the PLR the books earn in from libraries. It’s not a lot, but every little helps. And it’s an individual tentacle on my income octopus as well.

However, as I’m not averse to either finding alternative publishers OR publishing the large print myself, I quickly got over the disappointment. It still means extra work further down the line, but it’s not the end of the world.

The second thing to happen was I wanted to apply the Save the Cat technique to this story, and I set up a template in Scrivener especially for that. But I already had the first few thousand words on a different Scrivener file, and I wanted to transfer the old file over to the new file.

Scrivener is set up so that when you copy and paste something over, the formatting all goes to pot. I’m sure there are many, many workarounds. But I didn’t have the time to find any of them out.

So I had to copy type what was already written into the new file. It would work out quicker in the long run for me at this time, but I’m sure that once I’ve found out how to get around it, I’ll wish I’d taken the time now to do it.

That all worked fine, until the new version was only partially complete and I wanted to write some new material. To save time, I wanted to create it directly in the new file.

For some reason my brain and my fingers froze. My brain wanted to continue the new stuff immediately after the old stuff, but all the old stuff wasn’t yet in the new file.

At first, I started to create the new material in the old file so I could copy type it over to the new file. But I was so busy that this was taking unnecessary time I could ill-afford.

And so I made an executive decision: I wouldn’t write any new material until all of the old material was in the new file.

This morning, dear reader, that finally happened.

By Monday of this week, all of the old stuff had been transferred to the new file. But I didn’t have time to write any new stuff because I was off out to the writers’ group, and so the writers’ group had to listen to more of Catch the Rainbow instead.

Today, I determined that before I did anything else, I’d write at least 500 new words of The Fool. I did that, and I wrote … 535 words.

A few weeks ago I’d read out a partial scene to the writers’ group, and the next thing they wanted me to do was finish that scene. And that’s what I did.

The current state of play is therefore now thus:

• The first 9 scenes of 10 for Act 1 are written to first draft.
• There is only 1 more scene to write for Step 5 of Act 1 of the Save the Cat method.
• Character sketches have been started for three of the characters.
• Current word-count = 6,973.  (This will increase during the second draft process.)
• I’m itching to write Scene 10 and close Act 1.

That’ll do for one day. 🙂