November’s been a pretty busy month, but also one full of much excitement! I had the cover design created for Laura the Explorer (read about the design process here), I had the copy-edit done on the manuscript, I attempted NaNoWriMo again and I did all of this while trying hard to entertain my new puppy. Speaking of, say hello to Ruby!
She is a cavoodle puppy who is now almost 4 months old, and for the past two months she has proven herself to be an absolute time-waster for me. I’ve discovered that working from home with a new puppy is great for the puppy – not so great for trying to get work done! We’re getting a bit of a routine going now though with park visits, so I’m slowly carving back hours of time to dedicate to work again!
NaNoWriMo 2018
This year, I started the first draft of Laura the Explorer 2, but as you can see from the above graph, I didn’t make the 50K goal. I did, however, get 24K words done on this manuscript, which I’m pretty happy with! I decided to stop pushing words out, because I got to the point in the manuscript where I realised where I wanted the book to go, but also realised that I needed to stop and do some extensive research before just ploughing on ahead. NaNoWriMo is great for getting ideas down, but I don’t think it’s worth forcing yourself to continue if you think you’ll be writing stuff that needs to get thrown out later. So, I decided to stop and spend my time researching instead, going back into brainstorming mode for this book.
LTE Copy Edit
Another reason I stopped doing NaNo was that I had the copy-edit for Laura the Explorer returned from my amazing editor, and so have spent the last week working my way through that. I’m so glad I hired Alex, who has turned out to be absolutely amazing, and I can’t wait to work with her again on my future books! Her skill at editing is awesome and her comments and feedback on the manuscript have been so positive that I’m really excited about getting this book out into the wild.
Once I finish going through the edits, I’ll be typesetting the book and then sending it over to my proof-reader for a final read-through. Once that’s done, it’ll be creating the print and ebook files and – gasp – I will have a finished book-product! Scary but exciting thought!
What I’m Reading
Kingdom of Ash by Sarah J. Maas – like many people, I fell in love with Sarah J. Maas’s Throne of Glass series years ago, and was so sad/excited to read the conclusion! The book didn’t disappoint, and this whole series will definitely remain one of my favourites.
The Harbinger Series by Jeff Wheeler – I’ve only just discovered Jeff Wheeler with his Harbinger series and have been blown away by how good these books are! I’ve read the first two, and have the third one on my kindle ready to go, plus I’m now eyeing up all the other books he’s written. I’m looking forward to diving into his backlist, as he’s a fantastic story-teller.
The Shopaholic series by Sophie Kinsella – I’ve been a long-time fan of Sophie Kinsella, ever since this series first started, and am enjoying going back and rereading the early books in the series.
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