Salamander - two chapters down...

A belated 'Merry Christmas!' to one and all reading the blog. I had a fairly quiet one this year, with the 25th spent in Nottingham with my good lady, Louise, and resident house rabbit, Shakespeare. A few hours of Guitar Hero World Tour certainly took its toll on my voice, though. Boxing Day I drove up north to my mum's, where the rest of the family got together for a few beverages, some Christmas nosh and a bit of Wii bashing (a term I use to describe playing said console, not actually destroying it).

I gave myself two days off in total, and come the 26th I was back at the laptop thrashing out more words for Salamander. Challenging though it's been so far, I am thoroughly enjoying writing this book. I'll confess, I found it exceptionally tough as first but I put this down to a short break in writing (I was fairly exhausted after the marathon that was Fires of War) and the fact that I was starting again from fresh. (Personally, I think it takes about 10,000 - 20,000 words to break the seal, so to speak, before the narrative really starts to flow in your head.)

As indicated then, I'm just over 20,000 words in and a couple of chapters almost down (and yes, your mathematical acumen does not deceive you, that's about 10,000 words a chapter - it is a lot, but I've decided to maintain chapter integrity, rather than impose a lot of false thematic breaks, and break them up into parts instead, an approach which is working rather well at present). By the end of my writing stint today I hope to have reached the 25,000 word mark, which I think is reasonable given I'm researching and planning as I go along (to add to all the researching and planning I had already done for the book - phew!).

On average, I get through about 2,000 - 5,000 words each session, depending on if I've been at work or if there's a lot of dialogue (which seems to fill up the word count real fast). I am a little behind, but then I started slightly later given that I've been run off my feet with my day job. Still, all is progressing very well now (fingers crossed), so I thought it best that I provide a short update highlighting this very fact.

I'll be back in the New Year (or possibly, New Year's Eve, tomorrow with some other gubbins).

Until then...