Richard Wright

Those of you who have commented lately may have discovered that, after a wealth of spam comments offering porn and credit, I am currently moderating comments. Have no fear – the intention is not to edit what you say, but just to make us spam free. I have asked my blog software to automatically allow comments from anybody who has had one successful comment approved, so we’ll see if that makes life easier.

My head, these last weeks, has been buried in my novel Thy Fearful Symmetry, editing, and drafting the dreaded synopsis. Readers of my old blog may remember that I loathe synopses. These soulless manifestos are part of most novel submissions, and attempt to summarise the action of the novel in two or three typed pages. It’s a nightmare for an author, trying to boil down a story that has taken them hundreds of pages to tell, into so short a summary. Soul-crushing stuff, I tell you, and many excellent writers would rather boil living babies than willingly embrace it.

Fortunately, while writing Thy Fearful Symmetry, I kept a running tally of what was happening in a separate document. With every chapter done, I went back to that document and typed a sentence summarising the main events of the chapter. Now that we are at the synopsis stage, this document has proven an invaluable basis for the first draft, far easier than starting from scratch and working through the book again.

Of course, it was still too long, but it’s done now. Next up on the writing front, I have some projects to complete. In August and September, for various reasons, I should have some considerable dedicated writing time, and I want to make the most of it. I have some ideas I need to plot out in advance of that period, and I’m looking forward to it.

Also, Dark Terrains is coming. Very soon indeed.