Normal Service is resumed! #IWSG

I’m delighted to tell you that normal service is resumed! I have started writing again!

This is my Insecure Writers Support Group post, in which we share our successes and failures as writers, our insecurities, in fact. Anyone can join in, just sign up at the IWSG Sign-up page, write a blog post on the first Wednesday of the month, and go back to that sign up page to link with everyone else–or a goodly sample. Our host is Alex J Cavanaugh, and cohosting this month are:

Ronel, Deniz, Pat Garcia,Olga Godim, and Cathrina Constantine

Normal Service equals writing a book!

I’m not sure why it happened. I started thinking about maybe writing a chapter a month, and did the first in September, I think. And another in October.

I don’t know about you, but once I get into a book, I can’t put it down. And I’m the same with writing, especially when I’m back in my own world, aka the Viridian System, with those two fun (and sexy) asteroid miners, Big Pete and the Swede.

So November turned into Novel Month.

it may have been in part a reaction to the death of one of my guinea pigs, one way of handling loss, immersing myself in the adventures of other loves. But I knew I was stuck with this after a few days. I wrote till I’d run out of story, sometimes after midnight. I’d go to bed, wondering what would happen next, and woke up with the next stage running through my brain. So there were several writing sessions before breakfast. As the mornings are darker now, the guinea pigs didn’t seem to mind.

I came to the end of the first draft around Friday 23rd, at just under 67k words. If I was planning a sci-fi novel, that would be rather light. But it’s not meant to be a novel. There’s no plot, for a start. There are character arcs, though.

It’s the adventures of these guys before they became rich; how they came to be asteroid miners in the first place… and how they got to know the girls in book 1, The Perihelix so well. And it doesn’t hold back on their amorous adventures.

I thought afterwards, it bears some resemblance to book 9 of my Princelings series, where there are a series of events that take the story, or the reader, forward to where they need to be for the start of book 10.

This book reveals most of the experiences dropped in hints in the later books. Most of it is new, a couple of them were short stories that needed rewriting from a different pov.

And it all needs cross-checking with the established books to look up names, particular references, and the regular characters’ foibles and speech. But they are mostly in my head already.

Have you discovered something in your head recently?

Question of the month

Do you write cliffhangers at the end of your stories? Are they a turn-off to you as a writer and/or a reader?

IWSG December 24

If you have not advertised your book as a serial and you leave a cliffhanger, then

• I will dock you up to THREE STARS
• I will complain long and LOUD in my review
• I will NOT buy any more of your books.
• I may tell other people not to buy your books as it’s misrepresentation of your goods

Why? A serial is meant to be a cliffhanger… those drumbeats at the end of the episode of your favourite soap. The next episode needs the action to pick up where it left off, possibly with a different scene first, but then… back to the action.

A series, on the other hand, is a complete story. You finish off the plot with a satisfactory conclusion. Most live happily ever after. Of course, there may be some loose ends to be further investigated and unravelled in the next book, but that will be a different story, quite literally. It may pick up on minor characters, continue with and develop major ones, or introduce totally new parts of your world. It is all connected, but each book can stand on its own.

and you’d never leave a stand-alone novel with a cliffhanger, would you?

or would you?