The State of Things – January 2024

Happy New Year!

It’s been a while since my last update, which does make sense considering I never wrote one. Unfortunately (and fortunately, if you happen to be me) holidays to Greece 

and New York

got in the way through the back half of the year and prevented me from providing many (any) updates. Though this does bring me on to what I’m going to be focusing on for 2024 – consistency. My writing over the previous year really came in dollops – 20000 words one month, then 3 months of struggle, then rinse and repeat. 

To solve that I’ve set myself a target of writing every day, which most writers will be familiar with as the number one piece of advice new writers are given. I’ve always thought this advice was not particularly good or considerate. Life has a habit of cancelling plans, so to deliberately plan to do something every day seems like tempting fate for something to come along and get in the way. But then, when I’ve pictured writing every day, I’ve always pictured it as “write A LOT every day”, which (stunning realisation coming up) – it isn’t. So every day in 2024, you will be able to find me writing a minimum of 200 words, or at least not writing them and grumbling about losing my writing streak. 

You can also expect an update from me on writing progress once a month, even if it’s to tell you I’ve written nothing. Hopefully it won’t be though.

For this month, I can let you know that work is still happening to get Going Fourth, the Novel in Progress, ready for publication. I’ve performed a last style edit before it goes for formatting and also been in touch with a cover artists to create art. Then it’ll be a case of assigning an ISBN number and getting it up on to platform ahead of release date, which should be in the (relatively) near future. Keep your eyes peeled.

On top of that, I’ve spent some time over the last few months getting to work on the first draft of a BRAND NEW story, which is now up to ~25k words, or roughly a third of the way through. More details on that should follow if everything goes well and keeps on track through the rest of the year.

It’s here that I’d say see you next month but that didn’t really work out too well last time now, did it? 

Instead I’ll just say:

Until next time,

GJD