MORE SWINGS THAN ROUNDABOUTS

In writing terms it's not been a great week with a bunch more rejections landing in my inbox - one a day so far, and it's only Wednesday.

Still, I have a relatively thick skin these days and always do my best to remain sanguine about such things and have already started to think about other markets to submit the stories to. I rarely think of a rejection as being a damning indictment of my writing or story-telling skills - good stories get rejected as well as bad ones, after all, and there are many reasons why a particular tale doesn't fit a particular market.

It has prompted me to get serious about novel writing, though, bolstered by a great piece of advice in The Complete Idiot's Guide to Publishing Science Fiction by Cory Doctorow and Karl Schroder (which is a witty and rather handy book) "one way to write a novel is to commit to producing one page a day, every day". Three days in and I have three pages, no more and no less, but I have found myself itching to get back to the keyboard and continue on where I left off. I've taken it to the extreme of letting half finished sentences hang so that when I come back to the story I have somewhere definite to begin. Will this method work? Ask me in 365 days (or approximately 90,000 words) and I'll tell you (though to be fair, I have plotted the first third of the story and am adding to that as I go along with many notes and some ideas that didn't have a home elsewhere).

So, yes, there have been more swings than roundabouts this week, but at least the roundabout I'm currently on is a fun ride.