The State of Things – July

Week 1

So July got off to a fantastic start as someone on my morning commute decided that red lights just weren’t their thing.

Fortunately, I escaped with only whiplash but it did impact writing early in the month as I sat in a pain-pill induced stupor. I was able to spend an early part of the month looking into the process of self-publishing and identifying potential editors, cover designers and formatters to turn the manuscript into a novel. Progress

Week 2

I managed to get started on a final edit/proofread of the novel before taking some time away from writing to check out the Great Yorkshire Show – for anyone that’s not aware, that’s a show celebrating farming, with sheepdog demos and farm animal judging as well as SO MANY tractors. We followed that up by attempting the National Three Peaks challenge – a challenge where you try and summit the three biggest peaks in the UK (Ben Nevis in Scotland, Scafell Pike in England and Snowdon in Wales) within 24 hours.

As a team of 6, we spent Thursday travelling up to Ben Nevis. We passed Loch Lomand (and stopped off to take some pictures)

Before moving on to Glencoe, where some of the James Bond film Skyfall was filmed (and stopped off to take some pictures)

Finally arriving under the shadow of Ben Nevis at 11:30pm

After some tough climbing, we summited Ben

at around 09:30am, quickly getting back to ground level at about 12:45 to leave for Scafell Pike (a 5 and a half hour drive) at 13:00. Unfortunately, lightning forecasts and heavy clouds, put a stop to our efforts around 800m from the peak of Scafell, and prevented us from even seeing Snowdon, as we received news they weren’t allowing anyone to even climb. But if anyone is interested in seeing what the top of Scafell looks like during heavy cloud cover as darkness descends, please observe exhibit A:

Week 3

In the immortal words of the lyrical mastermind, Rhianna: work, work, work, work, work, work. Week 3 was a very busy week at work for me, which usually means no writing as I get home at the end of the day wanting to do anything but stare at words. Due to some important projects in the job that pays the bills, I spent some time working every day during week 3. I did get a chance on Sunday, though, to go through my pre-edit of the Novel In Progress (NIP), which I made some good progress on. The next stage will be a re-read to get a better sense of how its paced (I can never get a handle on it during the editing process, because the focus is on the detail).

Week 4

In the final week of July, I was able to finish the pre-edit of the NIP, which was great news until I found out that my editing software had also removed all of the formatting (such as bold and italics), which are crucial to this novel. That meant the rest of week 4 was spent going BACK through the book to replace the formatting after the edit. Now I’ll look into getting it into the correct format for kindle and doing an actual read on it, all while trying to pretend I’m reading it for the first time. Hopefully this will catch anything I’ve missed and allow me to make any last-minute content edits (i.e. do I want to be a bit more descriptive here). That read should take me into the first week of August, but we’ll see what life throws at me in the meantime.

See you next month,

GJD