The idea behind these 250-word mini-blogs was that I’d share what I was learning about the writing process, so, warts an’ all, here we go.

Even though I had approached my first novel as a writing outsider, I had the outlines for books two and three well sorted before I was halfway through Reset. At least I thought I did. I sat down to write Dammit with a clear idea of the main storyline, a stack of supporting notes and the secondary and tertiary storylines sketched out. As I’ve said before: the words are reluctant and elusive but ideas come thick and fast.

The first draft of Dammit went more or less according to plan. There were a few nice surprises and additions and a couple of blind alleys, but overall the only struggle was in trying to write it all down while avoiding the standard traps of cliché, adverb, adjective and worn-out words. Anyway, that’s what second drafts are for, right? Wrong.

Second drafts are for you (i.e. me) to read the book and see if it works - as a complete story. Dammit didn’t work, at least not well enough for my ‘new and improved’ standards, knowing that there are a load of people waiting to read it who I do not want to disappoint (I know this is probably a stupid way of thinking, I’m not pretending to be a sage). So I got stuck.

I got unstuck around 3:30 AM, three nights ago.