Howdy, folks! How are we all?

I wrote 980 words today on War Child. I’ve come to realise I’m essentially working on a second draft. Not quite writing it from scratch but I have rewritten the first couple of scenes. It’s a case of it being easier to do this than it is to add in the details I need to. Starting War Child during last years NaNoWriMo was a good idea as it got the story off the ground, but it has also hampered it. Where I was writing a bit here and a bit there a lot of the time I wasn’t able to be as deep with it as it needs to be. At the moment it feels like NaNo served as an in-depth outline for the story. It helped me get an idea of the story I want to tell, and how broad it is turning out to be. I think I’ve said in previous posts that I was loosely planning three books, a trilogy that would tell this story. Well, where book one was originally meant to end is a long, long ways off. At the moment I think this is going to be a good five book series, which I think I got overwhelmed by. Even now I feel like the scale of this is too big for me to get my head around. I think this has led to me not working on it too much since the start of the year, but that time has given me time to process what I need to do to get this first book done.

Watching the science fiction I have recently has given me a lot of ideas, as has diving back into the Halo video game series. I spent a fair chunk of yesterday afternoon replaying the first game, and boy had I forgotten how good it was. I’m playing the Master Chief collection which is remastered and damn it looks good. Plays fantastic too (I’d forgotten how hard those damn Warthogs are to drive though!). I’d not really played any game aside from GTA for quite some time, so I was worried the different game mechanics would have a negative effect. But thankfully they didn’t and I really got stuck in. It was a lot of fun and I’m looking forward to playing it again in the next few days.

To make sure I don’t get distracted by it, I won’t be gaming until I’m done with any bits and pieces at home I need to do, and I’ve written. I’m going to be starting kind of small with it, a scene a day for example. But I’m hoping that I’ll get into a flow with the story and this will increase each time I sit down to write.