Monthly Roundup: July 2024

Welcome to the Monthly Roundup: July 2024 edition! 

Where I provide an up-to-date summary of all my current projects 😊

Starting with the biggest update:

Lately, I've been feeling really unconfident in my writing abilities (especially over the past few months). This has been affecting the dark fantasy novel I have been trying to edit/rewrite for the best part of a year, Bones & Dreams.

As a result, I've been finding it incredibly difficult to write or even enjoy writing. There are also some personal reasons that have diminished my motivation. 

Therefore, after seeking advice, I recently made the tough decision to pause my progress on that story. Don't worry, I will be returning to Bones & Dreams again in the future, but for now I need to work on a different project. One that makes me feel more confident, more able, and have already received great feedback for. 

This leads me to my next update:

For the past couple of weeks, I have been working on editing the first manuscript I ever finished writing, Sanctuary-on-Severn. 

Sanctuary-on-Severn is an alternative historical, post-apocalyptic novel set in medieval England right after the Black Death plague. It follows a determined maid hoping to escape servitude, the spoilt naïve lady she serves, and the characters they meet along the way in their quest to find safety in a changed and dangerous world.

I originally wrote this story for my undergraduate and masters degree dissertations and received wonderful feedback on this from both lecturers and fellow students. It is also a project I had a lot of fun planning, writing, and doing research for.  

The creative writing sections of my dissertations were 7,500 and 10,000 words respectively, but I finished writing the first draft in April the year after I graduated. At that point, the story was at just over 39,000 words. 

Novel word counts start at 50,000 words, so I have a little bulking out to do to get Sanctuary-on-Severn to novel status. I have a lot of ideas for this and am already halfway through planning the updating outline. I'm so excited to be working on this project once again. 

For the edit of this novel, I am again following Jessica Brody's Writing Mastery Complete Novel Revision Course. The course includes a list of 18 things to check and really helps the process feel organised and focused. 

The first item on the list is to check whether the story has a solid structure and I plan to finish updating my plot outline in the next few days. 

To follow my progress on this project, check my next Writers Week post on Instagram and next Monthly Roundup here in August!

For my other creative projects:

I currently have no concrete plans to work on my other writing projects. However, I will continue to add to them (including things like research for Bones & Dreams) while working on my main project, Sanctuary-on-Severn.  

Current Read:

I am currently reading Valour by John Gwynne - the second book in his 'The Faithful and The Fallen' series.  

In truth, have been a little slow with reading over the past couple of weeks while working on Sanctuary-on-Severn, but I am 173 pages into Valour and greatly enjoying it so far. It is a fantastic sequel to the first book, Malice (one of my favourite books).   

So, there you have it, an up-to-date roundup of all my current projects. I am having fun with, and enjoy, writing and reading once again and the future is looking great 🙂