Not counting any chickens...

Yay! 10K. Finally, made it back up to 10,000-words after abandoning my previous draft. I'm not counting any chickens but it seems to be flowing far better than the previous version. I still have plenty to write about in this section of the book (should account for 1/4 of the book) and I'm hoping it'll get to 20,000-words. There's still plenty of the lead characters' backgrounds to fill in. I'm a bit stuck at the moment and need to start the next part before I turn in for the night. I've written over 3K words, today so on target for my end of March deadline. Have twitchy fingers and am dying to go back and do a rough edit but I'm scared that I'll end up dumping what I've written this time. Better to keep going frwards, I think. Perhaps, I'll allow myself and edit when I finish this quarter.

Lucky for some

Had to add a quick post so that there aren't 13 posts on my blog (unlucky for some). Actually, I am feeling lucky today. Definitely made the right decision to restart current novel and today reached 8,000-words so just a couple away from the magic 10K. The story seems to be flowing much better now and the characters seem more real, to me at least. I'm in less of a hurry to reach the finish post and resigned to the fact that developing the characters is as important as the later part of the plot where the real action will occur.

• Anyone else got any thoughts on how to develop characters through descriptions/their actions and how to introduce significant events from their past as well as their present?

Creative Flow

Hi all,
Hope everyone's had a fantastic Christmas and is looking forward to the New Year. I've been taking and enforced break from writing while I spend time with my daughter, Amber, husband Mike and all our relatives. It's been great fun but it's hard to pick up the creative flow of where I left off. I read in one of my many how to write a novel books that it's god to finish a period of writing mid-sentence when you're on a roll as it makes it easier to get going again.
Anyone else got any tips for keeping going when you're writing a novel?
SK

Bravery or stupidity/the skill of the rewrite

It was all going so well. I hadn't managed to complete the Nanowrimo challenge of writing a 50,000-word novel in a month but I'd almost made my own personal target [25K words by the time I break up for Christmas]. Then, I had one of those eureka moments. Unfortunately, the eureka moment meant that while I could see how to get my novel to reach a comfortable 60,000-words it also meant that I had to restart almost from scratch binning the 20,000-words I'd written so far.
Actually, that's not strictly true. I've merely saved it as a draft version in a separate file. It does fit into the overall scheme of things but I realised that in my desire to write the 'killer introduction' I'd always dreamed of I'd actually missed out a crucial part of the plot.
I find this one of the toughest challenges with creative writing. As a journalist in my 'day job' I have to write short succinct phrases and squeeze words into the space provided. However, this isn't always the case with creative writing. I wonder how does one tell the difference between a valid description and waffle?
If you want to compare the new extract with the old, click here http://www.savefile.com/files/353328. I'd appreciate comments on how the two compare.

Cover art

It's very premature of me as I'm barely a third of a way through my latest so-called book, but I had a great idea for the cover art and managed to merge two high-resolution images together from the web. On a positive note it's spurring me on to finish the project a bit as I can see a glimpse of the finished result. Anyone else got any thoughts on cover art/book covers in general and what makes a good or a bad one? What sort of artwork makes you pick a book off the shelf? Any thoughts on my own design (right?) - and yes, for the eagle-eyed among you that is a fried egg in the sky.

To blog...

....or not to blog. That is the question. A friend forwarded me a link from the BBC, today, containing blogging statistics (
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6178611.stm). The article claims that 200 million blogs are now lying dormant on the web. It's easy to see how it happens. I'm relatively new to blogging and was hoping that this weblog would help drive people to my Lulu site plugging my self-published books. However, after a week I'm starting to feel pretty lonely here in cyberspace as so far I've received zero comments on my blog.

Is there anybody out there or am I about to become dormant blog 200 million and one?

Why write?

Of course, you're not always writing for others. I find the whole process of writing is very therapeutic. It helps me to make sense of my life and the world around me.
I'm a firm believer in the power of the written word and think it's what sets us apart from the animal kingdom; our thirst for knowledge and self-improvement, the desire to comprehend the world around us? Books such as Alice Walker's, The Color Purple (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Color-Purple-Alice-Walker/dp/0753818922/sr=1-1/qid=1165910769/ref=sr_1_1/026-6757065-3248457?ie=UTF8&s=books), have changed the world.

Anyone else got thoughts on why they write, or other books that have changed your life/cultural ideas?