November 9th, 2020 – 775

~ Sam Shuttleworth

I’m still knackered but I’m starting to slowly pull myself back together again. This morning between work tasks, I handwrote the first 1,100 words of The Way Out, and it’s an opening I’m pretty satisfied with. It ties all the strands together laid out in the first seven books to create a complete picture of the state of the Ultaverse – the void between the multiverse’s, and the setting for much of this story. All in all, it’s going pretty well.

That’s not to say I don’t have some worries. I know the overall plot better than I did with TWR, but deliberately not by much, and while that allowed me more freedom to be creative as I went in TWR I think it also made the book’s first draft a lot weaker. My view on that hasn’t changed, the first draft is meant to be looser so you can pick the best route and tighten around it, but I hope this draft comes out better.

Working from home still sucks, and I am eager to get back in the office as soon as feasible, even if that’s not until 2021 at this point. I’ve got a long queue but I’m burning through it quite fast. It’s important I don’t burn out this time, and that as soon as I feel able I get this flat tidied up again. It slipped back after the ankle injury, and I don’t want it to stay this way. Here’s hoping by week’s end it’s back to its former glory.

Published by Sam Shuttleworth

I’m Sam, and I live to write. I spent most of the first 8 years of my adulthood trying to balance writing with a large amount of crap in my personal life, until towards the end of 2018 I threw everything out and started afresh with just my writing. I built the new me around one goal: I have to write at least 1,000 words a day. I called this goal 1K, and it changed my life. So long as I write a thousand words a day, the day is a success, and atop that I've managed over time to build the life I wanted all those years. My greatest flaws as a writer is I still use too many adjectives, adverbs, connectives as openers, accidental passive voice and I don't force my work down people's throats enough on pain of extreme and unusual torture. My greatest strength is I know my greatest flaws and I'm working on them.