Starting writing

It seems crazy that I've spent over 6 months planning the book, pitching it to publishers, finalising what will be in it and even thinking about how to promote it yet until a few weeks ago hadn't actually started writing it.  My husband has been teasing me saying I can't consider myself an author because I haven't actually written the book yet.

Unfortunately with my planning meeting being so close to the summer holidays I couldn't make a start on the book straight away.  Most of June and July is taken up with pre-summer preparations, writing lots of content for the site, scheduling social media updates, getting magazine deadlines out the way etc.

So finally at end of July I managed to arrange a child free week so I got onto the actual writing.  I'm used to writing articles for magazines which are around 1,500-2,000 words however this book will be around 90,000!  So I decided to best way to go about it is to view the book as being similar to a series of magazine articles.

The book was already split into 6 sections so I have broken the sections down into smaller subjects of around 2,000-4,000 words.  I know I can easily write 2 magazine articles in a day so writing up to 4,000 words of the book in a day was a manageable amount. Luckily each of the sections naturally break down into smaller sub topics so tackling one or two of those per day is a lot easier than trying to cover several at once.

It also made me take regular breaks, write 2,000 words in the morning and then stopping for a proper lunch break and think about something else for a bit before coming back to a new sub topic in the afternoon.  When I was writing the draft chapters over Christmas I would sit and write for 6-8 hours straight which probably isn't healthy!

I finished the first section of the book in that week at the end of July so I have sent that over to the publishers and I am waiting to get their feedback.  Being as I don't normally have an entire week free to write I am trying a new writing habit for this month.   I've signed up to the 30 day product creation challenge here.  It is aimed at helping you write an e-book in a month but I am going to use to get another section or so of my book done.

You commit to spending 10-30 minutes a day writing in September with the aim of establishing a regular writing habit which will hopefully continue beyond the 30 days.  I've decided that I will write every evening around 7-8pm as my son is bed then so I get some quiet time.

I did my first session this evening and managed to write 1,000 words on product safety so it was a good start. Looking forward to seeing how much I achieve by the end of the month.