{"id":331,"date":"2014-06-20T20:38:12","date_gmt":"2014-06-20T20:38:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chimneyrabbit.com\/?p=331"},"modified":"2014-06-20T20:38:12","modified_gmt":"2014-06-20T20:38:12","slug":"juggling-projects","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/?p=331","title":{"rendered":"Juggling projects"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s been a while since I wrote a blog post, but that’s because I’ve been pretty busy with my other writing projects recently. I completed my conversion\u00a0of\u00a0Tales of the Ancient Rabbits<\/em>\u00a0into\u00a0The Panopticon Papers<\/em> and sent it off to a handful of literary agents and a couple of competitions. So far it’s meeting the same fate as my other submissions, but c’est la vie<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I started some preparatory planning for the second draft of The Dragon on the Tower<\/i>, but I’ve been deliberately holding off doing any writing until a reasonable amount of time has passed and I can look at it with fresh eyes. I’ve got some reservations about this book, and my partner, who is my primary beta-reader, made some suggestions about how to improve it that are going to take a fair bit of rework. I’d also made a bit of a mistake in my historical chronology, so I read another book about Dark Age Scotland (Tim Clarkson’s The Makers of Scotland<\/em>)\u00a0to get the details of the period straight in my head.<\/p>\n

To fill in the time, I tried my hand at a short story – but it didn’t go particularly well. I’d intended it to be\u00a0very<\/em> short, perhaps in the 1500 – 2000 word range, but when I reached 2000 words while hardly scratching the surface of the story I wanted to tell, I decided that perhaps I needed to take a step back and do some proper planning on this one before it turned into a novella. Short stories used to be so easy! I used to be able to sit down at the keyboard and just bash out a story. Writing all these novels has messed up my short story writing abilities.<\/p>\n

Having sent\u00a0The Panopticon Papers<\/em> to a couple of competitions, I was having a search for more children’s fiction competitions when I came across the Great War Dundee Children’s Book Prize Competition<\/a> – where the brief is to write a children’s book about Dundee during the First World War. “Oh well,” I thought. “My book is about Florence in an alternate 1800s, not Dundee in the First World War.” But then I started idly speculating about what I’d write about if I had the time. And then I thought a bit more. And started taking some notes. And before I knew what I was doing, I’d written a plan for a children’s book set in Dundee during the First World War.<\/p>\n

“Ah, but I don’t have enough time to write it,” I said to myself. The deadline is at the end of August. That’s not much time to get a whole book written and through at least one subsequent draft. But the idea and the plan wouldn’t let go of me, so I started writing. And here I am, two-thirds of the way through the story, with over a month left before the closing date. I’m still going to be cutting it close, but if I can keep up my momentum, I might be in with a chance. If I don’t make the deadline, so be it. It’ll be another few tens of thousands of words under my belt, my fifth completed novel, and I can stick it in a drawer until I’ve got a free slot for submitting to literary agents – I only submit to a handful of agents at a time, and I don’t plan on having two different novels making the rounds at the same time, so that might be some time off.<\/p>\n

Keeping all these projects going is a bit of a struggle, and unfortunately it’s this blog that’s suffered. I’ve read some cracking stuff\u00a0lately that I wish I could find time to review – Katherine Rundell’s\u00a0Rooftoppers<\/em>, Jeff VanderMeer’s\u00a0City of Saints and Madmen<\/em>, and the free digital comic Moose Kid Comics<\/a>, which is as mad as a sack of badgers.<\/p>\n

Let’s not talk about the short story I wrote a while back that I might try to polish to submit to yet another competition…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s been a while since I wrote a blog post, but that’s because I’ve been pretty busy with my other writing projects recently. I completed my conversion\u00a0of\u00a0Tales of the Ancient Rabbits\u00a0into\u00a0The Panopticon Papers and sent it off to a handful of literary agents and a couple of competitions. So far it’s meeting the same fate… Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p37h7H-5l","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/331"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=331"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/331\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":332,"href":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/331\/revisions\/332"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=331"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.johnkfulton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}