Last week I did a bit of a mid-year assessment of my writing, comparing where I want to be with where I actually am, having a look at word counts and targets (daily, weekly, yearly), and sketching out not only writing work for the next six months, but looking ahead a little to see what projects I will have coming up well into 2010. It’s important for all writers – seasoned pros or enthusiastic amatuers – to set writing goals that are measurable and attainable, and it’s equally important to take stock at regular intervals to see what needs improving, and how the long-term writing plan needs adjusting. I even got a wall planner, wrote some dates and timelines on it, and stuck it to the wall next to my computer. It’s a good reference, and with a glance I can remind myself what I need to achieve this month, next month, before Christmas, etc.

For the moment, I have three main things on my mind. So for today, first on the list, is my superhero novel Seven Wonders.

Seven Wonders has a target of 100,000 words. I’ve just today hit 46,454. My own, self-imposed deadline for this is Friday 31st July, so I need to crank out about 2,000 words a day to get this first draft done.

Seven Wonders has been an interesting learning experience. I chose this as my second novel quite deliberately, as the modern-day third person style is very different to the pseudo-Victorian first person of my steampunk series. Writing is a continuous learning process, and having completed my first 100,000-word novel in one style and genre (Dark Heart), I needed to tackle a different genre and style to learn about that.

And it was hard work. I didn’t do a comprehensive outline either. Instead I wrote a list of 45 key events or plot points that I wanted to occur – most of them flow from one to the other, so arranging these ideas into a story order is relatively straight forward. I have a beginning, a middle, and an end, so really it’s just filling in the gaps and cementing the plot threads together.

What I soon discovered was that without a proper outline, I initially floundered a little. I found myself picking and choosing exciting moments from that list of 45, and writing those almost as self-contained vignettes. While each was satisfying in its own right, because I was skipping story chronology, I couldn’t quite visualise a cohesive narrative for the novel as a whole. Cue hair-tearing and table-thumping and declarations that writing is not for me and I should really be doing something else with my time.

Which, of course, is what every single writer thinks at some point or another. Looking back at Dark Heart, I had exactly the same feeling at almost exactly the same wordcount – that this was too hard, too big, too stupid, and 25,000 words really was enough of this nonsensical slog.

And again, as with Dark Heart, a few thousand words later it all seemed to snap into place. With Seven Wonders, it was when I picked a pivotal scene from that master list and wrote it, then an idea came to me and I wrote the next scene. Then the next, and the next. From here onwards I seem to be moving linearlly through the story, and I expect to continue to do so until I reach the end. This means that I’ll have the second quarter of the book to go back and write, but knowing how the land lies from words 50,000 to 100,000, it should be quite satifying to tie it up with some backstory and earlier events.

What I have I learnt so far from Seven Wonders? That writing is hard work, but it I can do it, and that throwing the computer out of the window after a few weeks of work is just a natural instinct best ignored.

According to my schedule, Seven Wonders will take me to the end of July. Following this, I have all of August pencilled in to edit and revise Dark Heart before I send it to my beta readers. If I can time it right, I should be in a good position to start querying agents with this – steampunk seems to be gaining (quite coincidentally) in popularity. Just this weekend, the latest issue of SFX magazine arrived with a big feature article on the genre, and there seemed to be a lot of interest generated by my guest posts at Babbling About Books.

But first things first. I have superheroes to torment and Californian cities to destroy. Someone has just betrayed the Seven Wonders, and the villain has met an untimely early death!