Tuesday 22 October 2013

What next?

Following on from my last post, I'm pleased to say that the editing was far easier than it's been on previous projects. I think it helped to have a deadline - I was entering it into the Harper Impulse Winter Wonderland competition, so it had to be finished by last Wednesday. I finished it and entered it with a day to spare and now it's the agonising wait!

This was the first novella I've written - it ended up at 30k words - and I found it a lot of fun to write. It forced me to focus on the relationship between my hero and heroine and their emotional journey, which was something I found hard to sustain in the last full-length (75k) novel I wrote. I feel much more confident with that now. It's also encouraging to see the finished story take shape so much faster than when I'm writing a full-length novel. I'm not into delayed gratification ...

I've pretty much decided to write another novella next. I had loads of ideas as I was writing my last one and most of them seemed more suitable for that length. For the next few weeks I'm going to work on creating some characters and then plot out their stories. I can't wait to get stuck in!