Confusing

My early chapters are beginning to take shape.  Slowly.  There's quite a bit of re-jigging required because of my inability to shut up, meaning that I'm going to have to add at least one more chapter than I originally planned for.  This now makes me very glad that I only did the chapter-plan for the first third of the novel rather than the whole thing.

So most of Chapter Two has now become Chapter Three; Chapter Three becomes Four and poor old Chapter Five gets moved for the third time to become Six.  This all sounds very confusing and makes me wish that my chapters had names rather than just numbers.  Not that it would probably help with tracking where everything keeps moving to.  In fact, it might make it more complicated.

I'm hoping that I'll be able to cut a fair bit out of the (very rough) draft of Chapter One as it's rather horrendously over word count at the moment, and that's without any kind of continuous narrative structure to it.  It's just chunks at the moment: scenes and thoughts which don't yet fit together.

But I'm not too stressed out about that (even though saner people would probably say I should be) because that's what Chapter Two-now-Three was and filling that in proved to be quite an interesting - and dare I say fun - experience.  And very satisfying when it's done.

I also feel like I should be doing more reading at the moment.  Since my failed attempt at reading The Warlord's Legacy during my holiday, I hadn't picked up anything new.  Sure I've re-read plenty of books and bits of books but I felt that didn't really count.  And we're always told how important it is for writers to read and who am I to argue with the experts?

This week, therefore, I started a new book, chosen on the advice of my younger brother.  It's Looking for Alaska by John Green.  I've already read (and reviewed) one of John Green's books before, and I'm a follower of his youtube channel, so I'm already predisposed to like it, despite it being out of my genre.  Although it has also been proved many times that I can't force myself to like something however much I want to.  So we shall see.... *dramatic music*

And lastly, I'd like to point out that it's August.  This means that it's the oh-so-scary month in which I have pledged to start sending out begging letters to agents for Hide and See.  'Terrified' doesn't even begin to cover it.