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!

Title-less but going well

Autumn colours are strengthening fast and it is not yet too cold in the daytime though early mornings are a tad on the chilly side.  Long may it last.
This is just the weather for writing a sequel to Abduction of the Scots Queen and I'm deep into it now. I have a first draft, which is a help and around chapter fourteen I decided to remove a couple of chapters and change the direction of travel, so to speak. It should enhance the plot, particularly where Marie de Guise is concerned, and more original that the content I had.

Maybe I'll add a paragraph here on a regular basis as a sort of PR exercise. Nothing is set in stone as yet, and there will definitely be changes before publication. I might even send a submission off to an agent to see what response I get. That means thinking of a title, which I never find easy.

Writing sequels

Guess what I saw on my bird feeder yesterday?
I know the picture is fuzzy and that's because
I took it through double-glazing. The last time I tried to open the window the mouse was gone in a flash! He lives under the sink-pond and no doubt shares accommodation with the resident frogs who inhabit said pond every spring, have orgies and produce hundreds of tadpoles. The level of nuts goes down very quickly, but it is not just the mouse; we have flocks of young sparrows and bluetits who have taken up residence in the garden this year - or if not our garden, then one very close by. The fly in in squadrons; one day they were closely followed by a sparrow hawk which crashed into the Virginia creeper never to be seen again. It survived, but I bet it got a fright.

Busy with the sequel to Abduction of the Scots Queen and trying not to get tangled in the politics of the time, or to fall in the trap of assuming that every reader will have read Abduction and have net the basic characters like Lennox and Meg Douglas. Tricky to get it down on paper without giving info dumps or confusing the reader. I'm also looking into the best ways of PR, which I abandoned at the beginning of the year. Now things seem to have changed. The online groups are not so busy as they used to be and don't seem to be where the promotion is taking place, whereas Twitter seems to be full of it. I'm re-visiting old links hoping not all of them are now defunct. Owners and moderators all have lives outside the group, of course, and "life" may well have got in the way of running it for a while.