It's a boy?

As of 12:21am this morning, ‘The Time Traveller’s Teacher’ became a completed piece of work. Checking in at a little over 8200 words it is a little weightier than I’d originally planned but it feels finished, well as a first draft at least. I have to say, I’m happy to have done it. Thinking back, it is probably the first completed piece of (non-work related) writing I’ve done in roughly fours years. Completed is a little bit of a misnomer, its still needs polishing, and probably quite a bit at that. Holding a printed copy of it makes it feel that little more real, and renews that feeling that this writing thing is something I do really want to do.

It was probably a little ambitious to go from a cold start to writing something this long, but I’m also looking at it as a learning exercise as much as a finished product. So on to the lessons learnt from this piece of work:

• writing around little children is extremely hard
• writing without the trappings of familiar surroundings and distractions works very well when you just want to write
• I really need to work on writing dialogue a bit more
• Writing at home, with all the usual distractions is going to require a lot more practice
• Sometimes writing the end of a story whilst you’re still half way through helps get the words out of your head and lets you go back to concentrating on the part you’re meant to be writing
• The last thousand words take as long as the first thousand.

So what next? nanowrimo is in November, so some of October will be spent planning for that. Before then I’d like to get another two or three shorter pieces finished off before than and take a closer look at the whole comic writing thing. At least it’s a plan… of sorts.