If we were having coffee, well first of all I’d have to offer an apology, this weekend seems to have gotten away from me. Sunday evening has crept up and before I really understood what was happening, the weekend is pretty much over. However, I feel like I’m ending on a positive note.

On Saturday I ordered a copy of Stephen King’s book The Gunslinger and today it arrived. I was surprised by how thin it was, curiosity led me to google, and I went in search of the exact word count of the book. Turns out that it only just breeches the 60,000 word mark.

Now, for the past six months I’ve been worry about the length of my book. The bulk of the fantasy novels that I own stretch into the 200,000 to 300,000 word mark and I was concerned that Shadow Dawn wouldn’t be a long enough book. However, it’s already longer than ‘The Gunslinger’ and I think I might be putting too much focus on word counts and chapter lengths. I already know that Shadow Dawn will be book one in a series, so instead of trying to cram in all the plot points I’ve listed down for this draft, I think I’m going to go back and narrow down the list. This will shift the focus of the book but in the end I think it will make it a better read and tighten up the plot.

There are seventeen days left in August and my hope is that if I get my head down and focus, I can have a rough draft of the remaining chapters done by the first of October. Then it will be a matter of going through the first 60,000 words and trimming out the chaff. I was going to try and finished this draft by the end of August but I can’t see a way of doing that without literally sacrificing all my free time to it and at the moment I’m pretty happy with the blogging routine I seem to be getting into.

This week I managed to publish my second post in a series that I launched in anticipation of my seventh blogging anniversary in October. The first was Seven Top Tips of Blogging and the second is How To Create A Blogging Schedule [working off what has and, perhaps more significantly, wasn’t hasn’t worked for me in the past.] Next week I’m planning a piece on guest posts and hosting guest posts on your site. The series is a little different from what I normally do but I’m really enjoying writing it and I’m reminding myself of some pretty useful things as well.

This week I also published two other posts a little outside the norm for this blog. One of which was on gender stereotypes. I had hoped it would spark some conversation but it didn’t seem to have gain much traction. The other was a piece where I went over an old poem and tried to workshop it in a blog post. I’m not sure it worked but it was an interesting challenge for myself. I’ll leave a couple of links below for anyone who’s interested.

What Are Little Girls Are Made Of?: Breaking The Stereotypes In My Head 

Confusion: How To Rewrite An Old Poem #ThrowbackThursday

As with every week, I’d love to know how you’ve all been. Do let me know how the week has gone with you in the comments below. If I don’t see you there, then until next week, here’s wishing you all the best. Happy reading and writing.