Those of you who are on Hortorian, or indeed friends with me on Facebook, will probably know that a few days ago I passed the 50k words mark with Earldust. Indeed right now it stands at fifty-five thousand words, with a projected fifteen thousand or so words to go. Given that it is fast approaching the end, I’ve been musing quite a bit about what I shall actually do with it when it is finished. If I continue at the rate I am going now, the first draft should actually be finished in two to three weeks time. After that, there is another three weeks before school starts – and then all the fun...

I seem to have neglected my blog readers for quite some time now, and it certainly seems like the optimal time to change that. For one, school is over meaning that I have far more free time. Also, I have been doing a lot of writing! So here is how things have been going: I went to France for three weeks during the month of June. That basically broke the writers block that affected me for most of the month of April and May (exam season, essentially). I wrote a good bit there, over a third of the novel (30,000 words or so). I was well over half way through by the time I came back. I suffered from a...

I realise I haven’t been blogging for a while. The reason for this is fairly simple. Last February, I opened a brand new young writers blog called Hortorian.com. Due to school, a growing social life, writing and my commitments there – I haven’t been updating as much here. Nevertheless, I have made some progress with Earldust: I’m now six chapters in. This may seem slow, but I’ve been doing improvements on what I’ve written already. I did a fair few tweaks on chapters one to three, chapter one was the most edited. I realised that the scene where Camillia, Nathan and...

Many of you may be aware that I also run a writing site Hortorian.com. Over the past week I’ve been working on launching the forums. They are now live at http://hortorian.com/forums. Having thought this over a bit, I realised that I need a bit more than the opinions of a few close friends regarding my own writing. I’ve decided as a result, to start posting Earldust Book One on Hortorian Forums. This will only be the first five or so chapters (internet sized). Also, I’ll probably be more motivated to write my story if I’m getting regular...

Well, I’ve regretfully had to take some time off writing. This is partly due to the fact that school is back and partly because I’ve been working on building a new website for young writers called Hortorian.com. No doubt you’ll be hearing more about this website soon. On top of that, I started to get a bit more of a social life. Most of my computer time was spent on forums and developing Hortorian. I’m sure you get the idea. But now I’m back writing again. Despite the fact that I didn’t write a single piece in almost a month, I did put together some plans in my head....

I will stress to any of you in a similar position to me, the importance of having a second opinion on your writing. The day I had finished the rough draft of my first chapter, I had my friend over. Those of you who are on Be Creative will know him as KnightInModeratingArmour, the former Vice Administrator. We worked our way through the first chapter line by line. While I did not agree with everything he said, I found it enormously helpful to hear an alternative opinion of my work. Why is this, you may ask? Besides the obvious spelling and grammar errors, there were obvious things that I’d left...