So. Did I manage to do all those things I claimed I was going to do in my week off?

Largely, yes. Hooray!

Despite being distracted by a sudden and alarming amount of life admin – for good stuff, at least, but still a lot to deal with – I did actually get pretty much everything on the list done, and also most of the various non-writing-related tasks too. Most of them. The important ones. Mostly.

Task the First: Finish Stuff

‘The Package’ is done. Almost 30,000 words out of a 24-word prompt. Not bad, if I do say so myself. What am I going to do with that story now, I hear you ask? No idea. Because it accidentally became a sequel to some stories from over a decade ago that have been in desperate need of rewriting since approximately the moment I wrote them, ‘The Package’ now occupies a very weird niche. Would it stand alone? Probably? Would it be better with the context of those other stories behind it? Probably. So sorting them out is now on the list of future writing tasks.

Most importantly, though, I had fun with it. These were old characters and visiting them again was a pleasant experience. Once I’d knocked the rust off we had a grand old time. So if I never end up doing very much with this story at all… it’ll still be worth it.

Task the Second: Audiobook

Done. I listened to the whole draft of The Fire Within audiobook, and over the course of about three hours I realised that… it’s a pretty good book. Because once I’d gotten over the weirdness of hearing my own words and just let my narrator take over, it was good; honestly, much better in audio than it ever was on paper, in my opinion. It’s a story that needed telling with an actual voice and it’s all the better for it.

Plenty of work still to do, of course; a few actual technical fixes, some minor tweaks, and a lot of admin to do as I figure out how audiobook publishing works, but this project is, at last, finally moving forward. Now that I’ve actually done my bit of the work. Whoops.

Task the Third: The Redraft

Salvage 7 isn’t a long book. Until you add in all of the Part 2 that I never quite finished, that is. But taking all of that, and all the notes I had, and all the new ideas that I spent a few days this week coming up with, and you end up with something that has the potential to be a very long book indeed. So it’s probably a good thing that my new outline has some cuts in it.

Obviously I haven’t rewritten an entire novel and a bit in the space of a week, but I have started. I have a new structure planned out, I know roughly which bits of the old books I want to keep and which will have to go, and my head is already filling up with new ideas on how to connect my bulletpoints together and make everything coherent. This is another group of characters who I haven’t worked on in a good while, and I’ve been getting to know Salvage Unit 7 again, getting to know what they do and how they react. They are… less pleasant people than those in ‘The Package’, let’s put it that way. They also, in fairness, have much more stressful lives and jobs, so I can cut them a little slack. And they will now have a significantly more stressful journey to go on, if this outline is anything to go by. Their odds of making it out alive have improved… slightly. For some of them. Maybe.

But it’s underway. I’m on it. And it’s going to take a while, and that’s ok, as long as I end up getting this story told.

Progress. It’s nice to have some for a change. Now all I have to do is keep it up.