July's Writing Progress

Editing continues on The Last Dragonrider. I took out about 1,500 words this month, so I'm down to about 128,000. That's still longer than any of my previous books...

At the start of the month, we took a holiday to Hertfordshire, where we used to live, to visit friends and family and do the usual tourist-y things. I got a few ideas for fun details that ended up in the book, and another idea for a short story.

While I was there, I wrote a short story from a prompt that I got last year. (This is quite quick for me.) When I gave a talk at Urban Arts, I said I'd demonstrate my outlining process, and asked the audience to give me a character, a setting, and a prop. These were a gravedigger, a forest in British Columbia, and a stuffed toy tiger. During the interval, I tried to come up with a plot that featured those three things. I got about halfway on the night, which was further than I expected to get, but it's taken me until now to figure out the ending. I can say without fear of spoiling any surprises that I decided to make the tiger a real one.

I should probably start sounding out beta readers for the novel.