I don’t start with a plan.

I’m not a planner. I’ve tried to plan and it sucks all the joy out of it for me. That might be my ADHD. I like discovering everything along with my characters. It’s fantastic when I’m writing and my brain has made connections I wasn’t even aware of. Happy coincidences, you might call them. I often have at least one ’Oh, so that’s why that happened,’ moment when I write a book.

As I’m starting Fatal Temptation, all I know is that the main characters are Akio and Lucas and that Akio gets in trouble and calls Lucas from the police station.  

Generally, I’ll write a few scenes of the next book while I’m writing the one before. At the time of writing this blog post, currently the day before I start writing Fatal Temptation, I only have three short scenes to go off of. 

When writing Diesel and Chris’ story (the book where Akio and Lucas were introduced), Diesel met a young girl named Adelyn. I didn’t know then that she would return but it became quite clear that she would. There was too much to her character to just let her go, and seeing as Diesel worked to gain her trust (enough for her to finally share her name with him), I knew he would be the only one she did trust when she got in trouble. I can’t give everything away though, so you’ll have to read about it in the book!

Before we can begin…

I’ve started the first day of writing with a bit of admin. Black week just ended and I had a sale going on, so I had to make sure my prices had reverted. It’s also the first working day of December, so printing out a new monthly planner is also necessary, along with checking which blog posts are next for this month.

Before I can get to writing, I’ll grab my Word template and adapt it to fit Fatal Temptation. Now, you might be wondering what I mean by template. It is simply a document that already has the front end, all chapter headings, and the back end that I use in all my books. Using my template just makes everything much more smooth and easy for me when I start a new book.

Now, seeing as this is a new series, I do need to adapt the template a little, but that’s fortunately easily done as I can simply copy and paste from the first book in the series. It took me about five minutes to do and now I have a working template for the rest of the series. If you want to try out my template for yourself, you can grab it here!

Let’s start writing

I start by placing those three scenes I mentioned earlier, in my Word document where I think they’ll fit best. That brings my word count to 1700 out of the 4000 I plan on writing today. I’m trying something a little different with my word count planning than I usually do. I use Pacemaker to plan my word counts and this time, instead of using the same amount of words each day, I’ve started off with larger word counts that then get smaller and smaller over the months I’m writing.

I generally start off strong when writing a new book and then taper off until I hit my writing block period about halfway through. I’m hoping that using this method might prevent or lessen that block, but we’ll see! I’ll update you in the next blog post!

Now, back to writing!

So many words…

I’ve started with expanding on the scenes I already have, and then I’ve moved on to the scenes that follow. I don’t tend to write in chronological order when I’m writing a book. I jump around all the time, and when I reach the last few weeks of writing, I’ll have something written for each chapter, but none of them will be finished. That’s what I spend the last few weeks fixing. Not every author’s process is filled with this much chaos, though, and yours don’t have to either. If you thrive on organized writing, go for it!

I’ve already introduced a few new characters and I have a slight idea of where their stories within this book are gonna go. That’s always exciting!

I’m ending my first day of writing with three hours and 4135 words. Not too shabby though, of course, 1700 of those words were already written so today’s word count is technically 2435 words. Next writing day will be 3800 words, so wish me luck!

It happened…

I had one day of writing, one day working with my PA, and then I was sick for almost two weeks. Nothing ever goes to plan. You need to remember that if you’re trying to write a book. Life always gets in the way, and that’s okay! Putting yourself down for missing a few days of writing isn’t gonna make up for those missed days. It’s just going to make you feel worse, and perhaps then it’ll take even longer to get back on that proverbial horse.

I also forgot (ADHD brain ya’ll) that I don’t sleep well during winter. I legit need so much more sleep than in the summer, and I usually need nine hours to function in the summer. I’ve slept so much this winter, and it still feels like it’s never enough!

Writing a book is like any other work in the sense that you need to take care of yourself to produce the best result.

Starting a book isn’t easy

But to keep writing is much harder.  Finishing a book? Most who start never get to that point. But don’t be discouraged because we’ll cover both how to keep writing when things get tough and you feel like quitting, and how you go about finishing your book.

In the next blog post in this 3-part series, we’ll get into how to keep writing. Sign up below to be notified of new blog posts if you want to keep up with this series! Thank you for reading along, and let us know your thoughts on the first part of this 3-part series in the comments.