My first “writing day” of the year was a reasonable success – 2,295 words added to The Ghost Smuggler. That’s not great but I enjoyed myself. I also spent some time posting the first exercise for the brevity workshop and critiquing some of the other students’ work which chewed up some of the writing time. And I got a free cookie from Subway.

I was hoping to hit the 70,000 word mark yesterday but I found that by about 4pm I was getting tired and distracted. When I wrote a chapter that could be accurately summed up as “I walked to the top of hill, there was nothing there so I went somewhere else”, I decided I should stop and go for a run. The good news is that on the run I worked out what to really do with that chapter and in the process filled in a small plot hole I’d be studiously ignoring for some time.

Unfortunately, this morning I realised there’s some inconsistency in the way I’m getting characters in and out of the spiritworld that I can’t ignore. As Brandon Sanderson is fond of saying, I can “fix it in post” and I think that fix will be as simple as deleting half a chapter, filling in the resulting gap with something better, and fixing the continuity errors that will create.

Last night we watched Tim Burton’s Frankenweenie, one of last year’s rash of goth friendly  movies. It’s based on one of Tim Burton’s early shorts (which you can find on the Nightmare Before Christmas) and we both really enjoyed it. There’s some great humour and lots of little nods to the James Whale Frankenstein movies.

Today, the 70,000 word milestone will fall. Definitely.

[Writing Day Down by Philip Harris first appeared on Solitary Mindset on 3rd August 2013]