Motivation Station!

For the last few weeks, I have been counting down the days to a well earned, truly deserved week off from the old day job.

Work continues to be a cause of high stress levels for me and it’s one of my motivators to purse a career as a writer. I want to dictate my days and hours of work, not have them dictated to me by poor staffing levels, low morale and a workload that keeps getting bigger.

As today is my first day of annual leave (hurrah!) I have started my week as I intend to continue it: writing!

Ok, aside from the usual distractions of Twitter (who knew a thread about tea vs coffee could go viral?) I have picked up my notebooks for a story I started whilst I was writing Horizon Skies.

I usually refer to said story as my 2nd WIP but realised that a working title is needed. For the time being, it is called The Puzzle Box. Previous titles were The Castle and 30 Days and 30 Nights but I felt they were a bit, “meh” and have been scrapped. The working title I have chosen does nothing to conjure up any kind of imagery of what the story is about but, it’ll have to do for now.

The Puzzle Box reached an impasse some months ago and I put it to one side to concentrate on Horizon Skies. Looking at it with fresh eyes was like reading something written by a different person. I read the last couple of chapters I’d written, and realised that they’re actually pretty damn good!

I finished writing chapter 9 yesterday and today is about typing up into New Novelist, the programme I use for writing. (I tried Scrivener but felt like I needed a degree in rocket science to figure it out).

New Novelist is great for just getting the story down in place where I can then copy into Word and fine tune using ProWritingAid for editing. This might seem convoluted but we all have ways of working that suit us and this is mine.

Once all that’s done, I’ll be rewriting the remaining story arc as I feel this book will come in at a shorter length than Horizon Skies; which is clocking on towards 100,000 words with the revisions.

Feeling motivated, feeling excited and looking forward to getting so much more done this week!