In which events overtake me and writing is abandoned. Temporarily.

My Etsy shop is doing surprisingly well. Which is awesome! My mum and dad came to London today and took me out to dinner. Which is also awesome!

My writing hasn't really progressed today, though, as a result...

I'm up to a whopping 1957 words today, a whole 110 words further than yesterday. This is... not ideal. I will have to do better over the next few days. Wish me luck?

Progress: 9k words!

I've decided a weekly progress update will keep me actually doing something on this story, even if no one else is reading these posts ;-) (If you are reading this, do drop in and say hi in the comments...)

So far, I've got the rough structure for the first 7 chapters worked out, and I've got 9k words written - although a lot of those are just notes now for scenes I haven't got to, and half-started scenes like Taris' wedding. But they count!

I also have managed to work out some of the Lieroi storyline for Juri - Juri-as-hero - which is good; I know how that starts and how that ends, I just need some middle now. And I get to work out some different peace-keeping and post-conflict reconstruction scenarios - one of which (increasing authoritarianism and power vested in the army) doesn't work for Taris' uncle, one of which (as yet undetermined) does work for Taris. Or at least, will work, since the book isn't going to go long enough to see its success. I need to do some more research into successful post-conflict reconstruction theory and practice; I knew that MA degree would come in useful one day!

Today's achievement: limited

Well, ok, so it's not been a spectacular writing week. But I've got much more of my outline done, I'm thinking about the story when I'm not writing, and I got 850 words done this morning. It's not been a waste of a day, after all.

The sticking point is that it's so complicated, my brain gets distracted and goes off on tangents about the other storylines, which while useful, doesn't help with the scene I'm supposed to be writing.

I think what I'm going to do with this story - unlike Exile - is to write each scene as a standalone, in chronological order, then rearrange them to where I want them to be. I'm struggling with the differing view points though. Assassin is narrated in the third person, and most of it is from the POV of the main male character, Juri. But there are scenes I want to have where he isn't going to be present, and I like the idea of having both him and the main female character as POV characters. It's just not easy, and I keep falling back into Juri's POV. Maybe I should just scrap the idea of multiple POVs?

Bah. Back to writing...