How’s that for a mad title? Could mean anything couldn’t it? Well in this instance it has been a rollercoaster of a week which unfortunately has resulted in possibly the lowest word count being added to Vinland yet – just 966 words in the last week. Therein lies the reason for the lack up blog posts of late, and I am very sorry to have missed my self-imposed deadline. My grandmother unfortunately passed away and I had to run out to the Netherlands for the funeral. Anyway, enough on depressing subjects, and on to the ferry crossings, birthdays and other bits!
Before I began to work on the book, I was warned that motivation can become a real issue once you hit the half-way marker, which is roughly where I am at the moment. When you first start writing you are very excited about having a story to tell, and highly involved with the creation of new and exciting personalities who will populate the world you are creating. The end likewise consists of wrapping up their stories and bringing the tale to a satisfactory end (hopefully), but the middle is when the doubts set in, “is this too much of a sub plot”, “Do I really need all these people here”, “ Should I focus more or less on X Y or Z?”.
From time to time I buy some writers magazines and see how the pros handle their writing efforts. Usually there are one or two things of interest, but this month’s has been really rather interesting. One writer listed up just how they keep things going, one trick she had was to set a timer for 20 minutes, in that time she has to write something and will then stop. She generally finds that once the beeper goes off she is so engrossed that she hits the “off” switch and keeps right on going, something I intend to try, as most of my other tricks are fizzling a little lately. Do you have any methods by which you keep going? What keeps you focused on a single task?
Another little gem I found from the writers magazine is that once you become published and are officially able to list yourself as self-employed then you can claim back up to 7 years worth of expenses in tax, incurred in the process of writing. So this means travel for research, entrance fees, etc. Well I know I still have my ticket to Thor sitting around somewhere...
Now today it is my mother’s birthday, and as such we went and visited the “Chelsea Medicinal Gardens” yesterday to celebrate. Plants and herbs, sounds pretty boring right? Well that is exactly what I thought, however I was actually pleasantly surprised, primarily because they had a patch dedicated entirely to the plants and herbs used by the Native American Indians, and another on Herbs found in Northern Europe... Vinland has already got one rather knowledgeable priest who seems to have a poultice for every occasion, and will soon be getting a Native American Shaman too, and now I can properly describe the plants they would gather and use for medical purposes, and this adds just that little touch more detail to the story. All in all, a rather unexpected bonus!
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