Originally published at tansyrr.com. You can comment here or there.

Maggie Stiefvater blogged a little while back about time management, and particularly how it’s possible to juggle writing with parenthood. I never know what to say when people comment on how I write books while I have small children to look after. On the one hand, I’m constantly ( Read more... )

Originally published at tansyrr.com. You can comment here or there.

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I’ve talked before about the variable nature of writing work and productivity. It’s a sad fact of this job that it can be hard to tell whether a particular task will take you ten minutes, three hours, a week, a month, or a year.

Last night I had one of the most ( Read more... )

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So April went pretty well, with me getting back into the pace of regular writing. The first week of May… well, I wrote 6800 words or so, which is not shabby at all, and yet falls short of the 7500 I was aiming for. 700 words, that’s not much, right? Except ( Read more... )

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Weird to think that April was the first time I had touched Book #3 (which may or may not be called “Saturnalia,” publishers are hoping for something a little more X of/and X to match the first one… we’ll see… ooh how’s “Ides of Saturnalia”???) since NaNoWriMo ( Read more... )

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April has been a mixed month for me, writingwise. The Easter holidays and a whole lot of personal stuff smashed into me, to the point where I stopped, reassessed, and changed my plan. Instead of getting stressed of my week of no writing, I counted out how many ( Read more... )

Originally published at tansyrr.com. You can comment here or there.

In recentish times I’ve talked about my top 10 standalone fantasy novels, why series novels should not pretend to be standalone fantasy novels, and the kind of standalone fantasy novel that’s really a stealthy series.

There’s one kind of fantasy novel I haven’t discussed in any ( Read more... )

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So, April has arrived. That means that Saturnalia: Creature Court Book Three needs to be well underway. My current plan is to write 20,000 words per month, which is my favourite sustainable level of writing - unlike Nano’s 50,000, it allows me to do some other ( Read more... )

Originally published at tansyrr.com. You can comment here or there.

Sometimes you use systems to measure things that can’t be measured, because that’s better than not measuring anything at all.

The writer’s daily wordcount is a great example of this. We know, as writers, that you can have a great writing day which only results in 12 words, if they’ ( Read more... )

Originally published at tansyrr.com. You can comment here or there.

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And thus a singularly unproductive day can be transformed into an incredibly productive one…

I am tired, so tired, my brain is just a little broken and one of my characters just developed a new lover interest (dude, seriously, did you need more?) which surprised ( Read more... )

Originally published at tansyrr.com. You can comment here or there.

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I was so busy blogging last night, I forgot to mention a couple of milestones.

First, Jem rolled over for the first time, yesterday. And thanks to me being so pushy about ‘look at how cute she’s being,’ both parents got to see it in real time. We then whipped out ( Read more... )