W is for... Writing I Ought to be Doing

is for writing I ought to be doing.

I suppose it's understandable that I haven't had time for writing or editing, but I still feel guilty (especially when checking in for ROW80)! I still mean to attempt the NaNoWriMo all day marathon, which officially took place a couple of weeks ago, but which I'll try tomorrow or next Saturday. It would be easiest to start drafting a new story, of course, but what I ought to do is focus on editing or, failing that, typing up last year's NaNo novel. Meanwhile, I heard about a couple of new agents entering the field, and queried them with one of the completed novels, so fingers crossed!

Author Malcolm Campbell was recently part of the My Writing Process Blog Tour, which featured four questions. Here are my answers:

What am I working on?

At the moment, day job and house-setting-up. I should be editing Druid's Moon some more, and typing up last year's NaNo story Larksong. I've also got some knitting projects I'd like to start!

How does my work differ from others of its genre?

My three historical romances differ in their settings, I think. I haven't come across many novels set in the 1470s or 1490s that don't feature royals or nobles of some kind. My characters are everyday folk!

And my paranormal (Druid's Moon) is different mostly in that it's 'contained' - there's no grand worldbuilding. Just a menacing paranormal creature (a Kraken-type creature) that's haunted a family for centuries.

Why do I write what I do?

I write what comes! Usually it's an image, such as for The Face of A Lion: I had an image come in my head of a boy and a cat walking down a dusty road, and the sea was rising behind them. I knew it meant they were walking back into time. And so I started writing to find out what happened...
Other times it's dreams; that's how I got into the world of Larksong, which is my first story set in the 1910s. Or the dystopian that's still milling about in the back of my mind...

How does my writing process work?

When everything's on schedule it's kind of like this: Draft story during NaNo. Type up story over the next month or so, editing as I go. Copy from PlainText on iPad into Scrivener on the pc, separate into chapters and scenes, and print story. This is the stage I'm currently at with Captive of the Sea. The next step should be editing on paper, then entering all those changes. In between I participate on the Compuserve Forum, sharing snips and doing exercises and the like (and having fun at houseparties!). Then comes sharing the story with betas, more editing, fine tuning, writing the query and synopsis, and finally, within a year if I've been organised, querying!

Sometimes you just have to stand still for a while...like this guy:

How does your writing process work?