Here we are on Sunday again – this weekend thing is going too quickly – again lol!

I’ve decided that from this week onwards I’m going to change a few things here, instead of attempting to post every day I’m going to reduce it down to four posts a week this will open up more time for commenting on other blogs (and I love commenting ) I’m also going to stop posting the Writertopia meter image onto every post and only include it on this Sunday post.

So here it is:

I’m actually quite excited by this figure (I know it’s small but it’s the most I’ve ever written on a novel without it being part of NaNoWriMo (so forgive me for doing a little dance right now )

This week I discovered I think I made the right decision to keep the story in third person – it allows me to take a sneak peak at another character without the main character being there and it revealed something I wasn’t expecting – which was fun.

It’s been a weird week though as not one, not two but three alternative endings have cropped up (I always thought I knew where this story would roughly end – considering I’ve been playing around with variations of it for a good five or six years) but now I have three possibilities and they all sound interesting.

I hope everyone’s had a good week too

I’m one of those people who loves a routine, during the week I get up at the same time, go to bed at the same time and generally do the same things each night at approximately the same time (well-ish).

I’ve always been like this – doing things in the same way, keeping everything consistent means I don’t forget to do something and ensures that I don’t run out of time to do things.

So it’s probably not surprising that when I decided again to try and write this story that having a routine has helped me to actually keep writing it. The thing is I arrive in work normally at around 7:30am (this is a whole hour before I need to get there) but I detest sitting around in traffic and not having a seat on the bus, so getting in early is what I do

Better still, the office is open at this time and as I have quite a small (easily reached) writing target of just 200 words a day I can write them before work. Admittedly at the moment I get carried away and most days I write 300 but it appears that applying what I do elsewhere has also worked with my writing (so far anyway ).

At weekends it’s back to my usual I’ll write when I can but that’s because there is no way I am going to get up at 7:30am on weekends. No. Way – I need sleep

Do you have a writing routine? When is the best time for you to write?

I love Jackson Pearce’s writing but when I don’t have one of her novels to read (or more precisely when I have one on my shelf that I’m dying to read but can’t get to yet) I make do with getting my Jackson fix another way … Jackson Pearce vlogs.

And today (a bit like my post the other day, I’m going to share with you my favourties!)

First up, is Jackson’s interpretation of song Tik Tok (happily renamed, Writers Blok)

I watched this video so many times when I first saw it – it’s just amazing and the amount of time and energy that went into it must have been staggering – but so worth it

Next, is an interpretation of the publishing process:

Just imagine if the process was really this smooth!!!

And finally, why you should buy a laser printer (it was on the strength of this video alone that I bought one (and at a discount too ))

I think from this little sample we can come to the conclusion that Jackson Pearce is awesome, right? Jackson posts vlogs which range from helpful writing tips to funny videos to thought provoking videos, well worth a follow. So go check out her You Tube channel, blog and twitter

I can’t believe it’s been almost a week since I restarted this blog – thank you for the comments so far

Anyhoo, I said on Friday that I would post a writing update today and I intend to do this every Sunday as a solid review of the words I’ve written and any thoughts I’ve had as I’ve written. This is also to help me revisit the goal I made at the start of this blog and to ensure that I’m actually meeting the weekly target!

You may have also noticed graphics appearing on the bottom of my daily posts – this is so I (and you if you wish hehe) can keep track of my daily word count.

Here is today’s so far (though I think I might write some more later):

My only thought so far is that I was thinking about changing it to first person, only to find that it wasn’t working in the first paragraph and I kind of prefer it in third person – so I scrapped that idea lol

What do you think of the word said? It seems like a nice little word, nothing wrong with it at all really. Okay, so what so you think of the alternatives to said? Words like asked, says (okay that’s switching point of view but still applies, kind of), exclaimed, shouted and the countless others.

I don’t mind occasional usage of these words, sometimes they’re completely necessary in order to work out who is speaking but sometimes when reading passages of dialogue – the page can be full of “said”s (aha, that’s got around my spell checker – still looks wrong though lol). For me personally it gets a little distracting and gives me the feeling that the page is stalling. The writing is trying to tell me something, but it just can’t get it out (reminds me of me most the time )

When compared with passages of dialogue with minimal usage of said, they for me tend to flow better, nothing’s getting in the way of the scene that’s forming in my mind.

This is all good in theory but it aint half difficult to pull off, I’ve only written a small amount so far and the temptation to use said left, right and centre is very hard to ignore. It’s only a first draft so I’m not overly concerned yet but it’s wierd how naturally said screams to be used. And if you get into dialogue with more than two characters surely a word like said can’t hurt – just to be clear whose speaking.

Ultimately my conclusion is that said is not a bad word and it can be practically invisible providing it’s not overused, I just have to resist the temptation to use it over and over again!