(December 14 – 20)

I managed to finish my Christmas story and I’m pretty darned pleased with it too. It may be just a slight trifle of a tale, but I got a bit more substance in there than simply a monster hiding in a child’s room. The plan now is to promote my previous christmas tales and then publish this new one on or before Christmas Eve.

I’ve decided to continue using Medium for now. It has a nice, easy to use interface, I get stats telling me how many people have looked at vs read my stories, and I’m able to publish my stories under my ‘Slightly Odd Tales’ strand.

I still have one of my christmas stories on Vocal (dot media) and I’ll leave it there for now, but I’ve already deleted the other one (which had barely any views). This was the story I recently did an edit on, but it turns out Vocal does not let you edit stories once they’re published, which is a big no-no given my propensity for leaving typos (aka easter eggs) in stories for my readers to find. Furthermore, I couldn’t even delete the damn thing without having to email the folk at Vocal first and waiting several hours for them to come back to me. It’s a nice enough platform, but I need full control over my content.

I have also been continuing to revisit the novel. I’m up to chapter 2 now, which is needing even more invasive surgery than the first chapter. The latest section in particular has taken on the semblance of a jigsaw: I’ve separated out the various scenes (and by scenes I mostly mean dialogue exchanges which convey a distinct aspect of plot or character) and am currently working out how to make them fit together, and which pieces belong in a completely different part of the story altogether.

Most people, of course, would do this sort of thing before actually writing the novel. However, if you’ve been reading this blog long enough you’ll recall that I took a hybrid approach to this one: I went in with an overall plot for each chapter, but left enough room in for the story and characters to find their own way. I think it’s paid off in the wild and crazy tangents this tale has taken, and tidying up these inconsistencies was always going to be part of the deal.

Who knows: maybe I’ll finish the damn thing next year!