Week 7- Staying in the Story

It's not going so well...

...as evidenced by the lack of blogs recently. I have not had time to post and likewise I haven't had time to work on The Werewolf of Priory Grange because I've been busy with other writing work. Admittedly that other writing is either important or paid (as distinct from 'important'), but it's still frustrating and my target of getting the book out in April is crossing the border from challenge to impossibility. I didn't intend for this blog to be a catalogue of why I'm not getting anything done, or a repeated discussion of how hard it is to find time to do this sort of work around the stuff with hard deadlines so I'll try to avoid harping on it and talk about a different issue the problem raises.

I only wrote about 1000 words of the book last week, and I had to do that hastily in between other things, just so I had written something that week. When I sit back down for a proper morning or afternoon with it then how easy is it going to be to get back into the story? The main call on my time recently has been ghostwriting - the books are a very different tone to mine and are written in first person, and if you've been writing 10,000 words a day in one style it is quite hard to just switch to another. (Or at least I find it quite hard.) I've always thought I was a pretty versatile writer, comfortable in different genres and media, and I've always worked on several things at once, moving between them. What makes this different is the time I've had to take away from my book - if I was ghosting in the morning and doing my thing in the afternoon (which is how I prefer to work) then that would be fine.
So what do you do? Well, what can you do? You read the last chapter or so that you wrote and hope that gets you back into the story, and you accept that the writing will probably be a bit shit for the next few pages while you find your feet again. As ever, first drafts are allowed to be bad - just get the story out and fix the writing later.
I'm sorry this has happened now because I had reached a turning point in the story, when all the stuff that has been beneath the surface, suggested through atmosphere (I hope), and inference starts to become explicit; when the suspense descends into actual horror; when people start to get killed. That wasn't really the case with The Mummy's Quest - as I've said before, that was more action/adventure, so it got going more quickly. I had been looking forward to writing this section but also feeling nervous because it is stylistically different to what I've written before and it's a key moment. Having to write it under these straitened circumstances is not ideal, but I'm still looking forward to it.
And that's something to say about The Werewolf of Priory Grange, however much it's delayed, however much I struggle to find the time to work on it, however much sales of the first book have plummeted this month, I enjoy writing it. And when you spend a lot of time ghosting books you don't actually like, then doing something that reminds you what a great job writing is and how lucky you are is vital.

Week 5 - Genre

You have to take risks...

...every now and then, or the writing becomes predictable. I'm not good with risks, I'm usually happy to write what is expected of me or what I think will please people. But I discovered a few years ago that I actually suck at second guessing what people want and I write better when I just follow my instincts, so I'm better off writing what I want and hoping people enjoy it.
The specific 'risk' I am taking about with reference to The Werewolf of Priory Grange book, is the genre into which it falls. Actually, 'sub-genre' would probably be more accurate. All the books in the Universal Library series are horror/comedy and tonally similar, but I've decided that the sub-genre of horror into which they fit is free to change depending on what suits the story. The first book, The Mummy's Quest (available here) is an adventure story, but that didn't really work with what I had in mind for the new one, so I am taking the bold decision to change genre and hope that the people who enjoyed the first one will go with me. The Werewolf of Priory Grange has less action and is more based on the old gothic romance novels - the sort of books where heroines (often governesses) are trapped in old dark houses in the middle of a windswept moor, with creepy children, a cast of aging eccentrics and a handsome stable hand in tight trousers. Now that I'm five chapters in (had a good weekend, managing to knock 8,000 words) I'm really getting into this style of writing and, in deference to the conventions of the genre, I've decided to make a couple of the chapters diary entries written by the protagonist.

My only slight concern is the pacing. In The Mummy's Quest there was certainly a good deal of character establishment and scene setting in the early chapters, partly because, as I have said before, that's my favourite part of the writing process, but that stuff was happening alongside the horror plotline. The Mummy makes it's presence felt early on and we meet it relatively quickly - although it is kept largely in the shadows at this point. The Werewolf of Priory Grange has a much slower build, it's more of a mystery. Because we don't know who the werewolf is, a lot of time is spent getting to know the people it might prove to be, dropping hints, foreshadowing events, laying the odd red herring. Again, I like this style of writing - this is the sort of thing I would choose to read - no matter the genre, I think storytelling should start with character. But it does make me worry about whether or not people will stick with it. In the end, if readers like a character they will follow them and allow the mystery to slowly unfold because it is the character they are following.  I just have to trust that people will like my protagonist, and if they don't then none of the rest of it really matters.