The novel Gatehouse Apartments is complete except for a bit of rewriting I want to do for the 'release version'. In this, I intend to rewrite the prologue, as I don't think it adds anything to the story. I think it's a bit too involved and something more punchy would serve the story better so we can get to the main characters more quickly.
The new prologue will be a quick little ghostly encounter between the twins (who are in the epilogue) and the denizens of the apartment block. Just something to set the scene and build a little atmosphere before we launch into the main story.
Gatehouse Apartments ran 88,020 words (not counting the ‘afterword’ or the rewritten prologue) and it took me from Monday, 26 June 2023 to Wednesday, 24 January 2024 to complete, which is about seven months.
That’s still a long time, it works out to less than five hundred words a day, and I wish I could get words down on paper faster, but I’m just an Alan doing Alan things… And most of those badly, so all I can do is apologise and push on.
If we can compare writing this to “The Cluster” I clocked in about 90 words a day writing that one, so 500 is a huge improvement.
My greatest sadness is that I don’t have the time, or quiet moments, in which I can write. I’ve said before that I think I might be able to get good at this writing lark if I can push through all my bad habits and let go a little. But I do think each project is a little better than the last, at least in the execution of it, though some stories may be better than others. Some stories may be more to the taste of the reader than the next might be.
I have a little work to do to finish this one off, then I’ll have to start considering what the next book will be. I don’t want to sit still too long. The longer I don’t write the more difficult getting it all moving again is.