Hurrah, Distraction Already!

Hello. I'm Clare Sudbery, and I'm about to start writing a new novel and ooh, look, here's something else I can do instead. ;o)

I have two novels under my belt, one (The Dying of Delight, Diva Books) published in 2004, and one (currently called Dance Your Way to Psychic Sex) which has just been sold to Random House in Germany. I'm awaiting the results of more negotiotions (UK, rest of world etc) from my agent, my breath meanwhile baited (sic) with a small wriggling maggot.

I've been meaning to start another book for ages. Apart from anything else, I finished DYWTPS (even that is too much typing, so I generally refer to it as DYW) over a year ago and the whole process of finding agent, publisher, etc is sooooo long and tortuous that another book would be the ideal distraction. But, you know. Life, work, illness, children, procrastination, yadda yadda.

The thing that has finally galvanised me is my second child (real one, with arms and legs - not creative issue), gently prodding me from the inside and scheduled to make an appearance on July 7th. After which I suspect my hands will be otherwise engaged.

So. This is my plan: To write the first draft of Novel III before June 21st, which gives me 14 weeks. I'm aiming for 100,000 words so I want to write 7,500 words per week (to give a total of 105k). I'm also frantically nestbuilding and faffing about with other things, but there's always spare time - right?

With my last book I spent 18 months arsing about with plot outlines and character descriptions before I finally started writing properly, and although I'm sure those things are useful, for me they were just very elaborate procrastination tools. And anyway, I don't have time for that. So after some agonising over the subject of this new one, I now have a simple two-line description (and oh, all right then, a fair few notes). I know the basic outline of the plot, and am going to jump straight in. No faffing, no fiddling, no rewriting halfway through. A whole first draft, which will then be put aside for at least 6 weeks, and then I'm allowed to take a giant red pen to it. Gawd alone knows when it'll get finished, as I like to rewrite and will no doubt do a full 2nd and 3rd draft before it's ready for public consumption, and there's the small matter of babies and other work... eek. But at least I'll have the raw material.

And you lot are going to cheer me on and shout at me when I flag and not let me use the excuse of writing blog posts when I should be starting work, right? Yes. Good. Thank you. And I will do the same for you.

P.S. I blog at Boob Pencil, and am also the founder of BloggersWithBookDeals, whose public face is bookarazzi.com.