Friday 16 October 2015

Second drafts

Has anyone else discovered what an odd feeling it is to check the Kindle stats  and see how many pages (of your book) people have read overnight?
I get a little kick of pleasure every time I see a good number up there. OTOH, there was the time someone  grabbed Abduction while it was free for a day and read one page and never went back to it! Odd insights we get these days from Amazon's technology.

I feel as if I'm really getting to grips with Matho's sequel, but wish I could think of a decent title for it. I'm up to chapter twenty-two in my run through and enjoying the chance to enhance the tale by all sorts of things: taking out redundancies, combining two separate sentences into one more interesting one and generally adding stronger verbs and more interesting descriptions. (Some were pretty mundane, I have to admit!) I've tweaked the plot-line around chapter 15, too. I suppose that would be the sagging middle everyone talks about. I decided what was happening was too similar to what had happened before, so I took Matho off in a new direction and the story works much better for it.

The good thing about doing this a couple of years after I did the first draft is that I know the ending and I know my characters so much better - and of course, as we all know, practice makes perfect. My writing has improved - not that I'm perfect yet, but I'm better than I was!

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