Back to the grindstone...AKA freedom

My exams came to a finish at 12 noon today, which means I have a few months of freedom now to dive back into the writing, editing and proofreading (the latter is for a friend, who'll be releasing some new ebooks soon and I'd recommend them without hesitation: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Jody-Kihara/e/B004Q28H7G/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0).

It's good timing, because the final chapter of 'Zack' is going through Critique Circle this week, and once that's finished there will be nothing to stop me from editing. Other than the paralytic thought of opening my crits and viewing the comments and actually doing the editing. Uh... this is always the worst part, mentally working myself up to a state where I actually dare to look at the comments. I'm fine once I'm actually doing it...

In other writing news, I've been formulating ideas for a new novel. Well, it's kind of an old novel idea (years old), which I've never seriously worked on until this year. But I've written a couple of thousand words. The main issue was that while I had a strong sense of the protag and her initial adventures, I didn't have much of an overall PLOT. The more I thought about it, the better sense I had of her entire family and her close friends...but even then, I was drawing blanks for the final climax of the novel. Thanks to a short brainstorming session with some friends, though, I think I've developed a climax for the novel that will work really well and tie a number of things together.

I'm amazed how much it has progressed in the last week, really. Especially considering that I should have been using that time revising for the last exam (but it was soooo boring). I now feel pretty much ready to write it. It shouldn't be too difficult to write. It's a mid-grade novel, of a similar genre to Jacqueline Wilson. The only tricky part is that I want the novel to span at least ten months, and I've never been good at sustaining a novel over a period of time. The last novel, for instance, spanned a period of about 3 weeks. Still, a challenge is always good.

Anyway, that's where I'm at right now. I feel I really need to get a book out electronically this summer, but I don't know which one to choose. The one I originally considered 54321 is only 30,000 words in its current reworked stage, and still needs a lot more rewriting before it'll be finished. I could epublish my old fantasy novel, and I thought up a neat idea for that the other day which I'm quite interested to implement, but that would be quite a major overhaul, too.

Hmm! Too many projects all vying for my attention. I can only deal with two at the most. So I think I'd better stick with 'Zack' for editing, and the new novel because writing something new is always indefinitely more satisfying than rewriting.

Tchüss!