Although not ideal in almost every other way, I’m finding this a surprisingly good year so far for writing productivity. As mentioned in a previous post, after finishing Pitkirtly 20 in mid April, I went on to finish my draft of The Heir to Nothing and found myself racing on ahead with another novel in the series (The Unwilling Heir) before the end of the month.
Now, as we get close to the end of May, I’ve just clicked ‘publish’ (actually there is a little more to it than that) on The Heir to Nothing and I’m within two chapters or so from the end of my first draft of The Unwilling Heir.
Writing the new one while I’ve still been trying to get the chapters in the right order in the one before has actually been very useful. The characters and places are all in the front of my mind so there has been a lot less hassle in terms of looking up people’s names and titles in previous books. My main issues with The Heir to Nothing, however, have been questions of fact, such as how big a crew someone might need to sail a boat across the Channel, and also my apparent inability to get the chapter numbering in sequence throughout the book. Last weekend I was almost in despair over this, having discovered chapters 7A, 7B and 7 more or less next to each other but actually out of order in the story, and also having found that I had reached chapter 15 or so and then re-started the numbering at 12 for no apparent reason.
By contrast I feel the new one, written under much calmer circumstances than usual because there has been nothing much else to do except my part time day job, has progressed quite smoothly and logically. Of course that’s before I’ve looked at it with my editor’s hat on! By the way I’ve managed co-ordinating covers for the two of them.
Because I’ve decided to try and enter them both in the Amazon Storyteller contest – despite having had no success whatsoever with it in the case of the first two books in the series (I’m stubborn like that) – I’m having to put them into Kindle Unlimited for now, although I may take the whole series out later in the year. I also have to make paperback versions of all of them, which always results in a lot of hair-tearing. But having got that part out of the way for one book just now I don’t feel too bad about it. I’m hoping to be able to publish The Unwilling Heir some time in August, all being well.
The Heir to Nothing will take a little while to go live as I believe there may be some extra delays on Amazon at the moment. After it’s definitely live I will book some free days for it.
Cecilia Peartree - woman of mystery 