A 2021 project

Happy New Year! 

I hope you all had a safe and relatively enjoyable one. Fingers crossed the vaccines are rolled out quickly enough for us all to leave the house a little more this year.

I had a reasonably productive 2020, despite everything, and there will be news about my 2021 book soon. It's not out until the autumn, but the Hunted paperback will be out in early March. 

As always, I'll be writing another novel, but this year I'm going to try something new. Inspired by a technique Jenny Blackhurst told me about, I've made a chart of all 365 days in 2021, and I'm going to try to keep an unbroken chain by crossing off a day every time I write at least 100 words on a side project.

What's the side project? I'll tell you on New Year's Eve.

I tried this for a few months last year and it worked pretty well until I got hopelessly stuck, so I think the secret is to plan ahead a little more. It showed me that even small amounts of writing can build up to a lot of words pretty quickly. A bit like a micro-version of my 500 words technique.

Maybe this will be all on one project, maybe it'll be on more than one. The only rule is, I have to do 100 extra words on something that isn't the main book every day, all year.

If you'd like to do this yourself, feel free to download my chart.

All you need to remember is what Fleetwood Mac (and indeed Adrian McKinty) said: 

Never break the chain.