Back on Deck

The downside of writing a novel in your spare time is that sometimes, life just gets in the way. Since finishing the manuscript in March, I’ve been incredibly busy with work. And over the last month or two, I’ve gotten some well deserved rest and cleared my brain by travelling Europe – roughly 10,000 km by bike and car, all the way from the Nordkapp (12°C, rain and wind) to the island beaches of Croatia (34°C, blazing sun).

Now that I’m back home, I’ve started to transcribe the handwritten pages on my computer. I’ve just started this work, and the Scrivener file is currently reporting 73,876 words. I have no idea how long it will take to transcribe those 108 pages, but my goal is to do a little something on this project every single day from now on and chip away at that mountain of work until I have the whole novel on my computer and can do first full editing pass on it.

One upside of not doing anything on the novel for a few months, by the way, is that I have some distance to what I’ve written now and can do some editing of finer language details while I transcribe it. I’ll let you know how the work progresses. After all that travelling, I won’t be going anywhere for a while.