You might think I’ve spent the last week basking in the post-release glow, and while it’s true I’ve done a bit of basking, I’ve not been entirely resting on my laurels.
In fact, I’m hard at work on Anna’s next mystery, which I’m determined to get into your hands more quickly than the last one. (There was a two-year gap between The Shadow Men and Women Who Kill, which I don’t intend to repeat.)
Anna 5 (catchy title, no? Rest assured, it’s a placeholder) has been coming on leaps and bounds in the last few weeks. It’s shaping up to be Anna’s most engrossing mystery yet, and I’m loving the dark and dangerous directions in which it takes her. I’m not ready to talk about the plot yet, but I DO want to share a little about my writing process this time round.
When my professional writing journey began, I was an aspiring screenwriter, and in a lot of respects I still think the script format is the one with which I feel most at home. When I’m trying to figure out a particularly complex scene, I’ll often sketch out the dialogue in script form because I find that to be quicker and more straightforward than trying to figure out all the scene description, dialogue tags and other minutiae at the same time.
So I’m writing the first draft of Anna 5 as a screenplay.
Actually, it’s more like Draft Zero than Draft One – an intermediary step between the (relatively sparse, by my standards) outline and the actual novel, designed to allow me to write quickly and to figure out what works and what needs changing before I’ve sunk a bunch of hours into trying to perfect the prose.
And it seems to be working. I started writing at the tail end of August, and after just over four weeks, I’m closing in on the end of Act 3 (of 5). If my calculations are correct, I’m a shade under 60% of the way in. I’m feeling really positive about what I’ve written so far, which hopefully augurs well for a relatively smooth revision process before I set about converting it into novel form.
I have an informal deadline for finishing the draft, which I’m not going to share with you just now so you won’t be able to tell me “I told you so” if I don’t hit it. But I actually think there’s a decent chance I WILL hit it. Certainly, if I keep up the current pace and don’t run into any unexpected pitfalls along the way.
I leave you with a brief snippet of the end of Act 2, which gives some idea of what Draft Zero looks like in practice, in addition to teasing the return of a popular character from The Shadow Men…
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