Oh Half Term, how I long for thee

Half-term approaches - and it cannot come soon enough.  There's a special kind of exhaustion that comes with spending every working day somewhat stressed, and I am so ready for a break.  Not being what amounts to a professional nag for a week will be rather nice.

I'm off to York on Saturday with my sister to visit my little brother (that 6'4", 19-year-old, living-away-from-home little brother, who refuses to be anything else in my mind.  Younger.  I need to think 'Younger'.)

Horrendously long and boring train journey notwithstanding, I'm really looking forward to the trip.  Heck, even the aforementioned train journey has its perks because it'll give me a solid block of time in which to write with few interruptions.  Alright, the chairs aren't comfortable and the legroom is downright painful for someone over 5'7" after a while, but with the outrageously priced wifi at least I won't have the internet to distract me.

Progress on book 3 has been fairly steady if not particularly voluminous.  It's coming along in little chunks scrawled down during my lunch breaks, though this does mean I have to type it all up at some point.  I think I need to rearrange my desk.  It currently isn't very suited for such a task.

I ironed out a much clearer plan earlier in the week too.  I'd thought I'd already done it, actually, but when I went back to look at my Grand Plan for Book Three, it was rather more scribbly-and-on-several-scraps-of-paper than I'd remembered.  It's a little more ordered now, thank goodness.

I think.  Gosh, I'm paranoid I'm imagining order where in fact there is chaos.  Better go check it again.

Writing the book I want to read

I saw a post on Tumblr the other day which got me thinking (always dangerous, I know).  The gist was that the writer who'd made said post would rather be reading the book they were writing than having to go through the effort of writing it.  Make sense?  Probably not.

While I can't exactly agree with the sentiment because of how much I enjoy the writing process, it did strike me.

In an extension of my thoughts about readership in my previous blog post, the Tumblr comment allowed me to think about my work as a reader - but not about some other, hypothetical people who might one day read my novel.  More what I would want if this was a book I was reading rather than writing.

It sounds like an obvious thought, typing it out here, especially as this was how I always wrote, back in the day (when I were a nipper...).  I don't seem to do it so much anymore.  In planning book 3 I've thought an awful lot about what I need to include but not a great deal about what I want to have.

So I made a list (I do like me a list) entitled 'What Would I Want from Book 3?'  And the points I wrote were actually quite surprising.

But I won't go into the specifics of what my exercise produced.  For those who are familiar with my series, there could well be spoilers; for those who aren't familiar, it probably wouldn't make the blindest bit of sense.

The result is what's important about all this - that I'm suddenly much more excited about book 3 than I was before.  I've made only small changes to my plans but it made a big difference to my mind-set.  This is a book I want to read as well as write.

Chapter One's pretty much done and Chapter Two is coming on a treat.  I'm really looking forward to getting stuck in!