SHINGLE

Just completed the first draft of "Shingle" - a teen crime thriller. It's been an interesting project so far because I wrote the original story about two years ago. It wasn't much good so I put it aside for a year or so then decided to take the basic elements and start over. With this second version I tried a new approach, spending about four weeks on plot alone. By the end of that time I thought I had the whole thing watertight - I worked it over and over to make sure the mechanics of the story worked well.

But you can only go to a certain degree of detail in an overview, and once I hit those final chapters I found the story didn't want to fit the mould I'd spent so long creating. The smaller details went against the grain, making my original idea unrealistic. To force it would be wrong, so I went with the flow to see where it would go.

I'm really pleased with the final result. It feels more natural, and proved that too much time spent plotting is really time wasted.

This very tacky photo was taken when I wrote the original version - did you spot the blue fingers? Ugh!

January Stats

I hit my target! Quite surprised because I had a few non-writing days in the back end of the month. Going back to the original plan, if I wrote a minimum of 500 words per day, every day, that would amount to 15,500. My actual turn out was 17,800 of new material. I'm hoping to beat that next month.

Shingle stands at 25,000 words. I'm on the home straight now, and I'm getting keyed up for The Dealer's Dog, which I hope to make a start on by the end of Feb.

No more short stories in the post - maybe later this month.