The (Book) Shipping Forecast

I've just been reading a post by Michael over at 2blowhards.com entitled Tacit Knowledge -- Writing a Book. It's a particularly hard-nosed look at how many people want to write books, how many get published and how many make a living doing it. It's not rosy. It's not new either, anyone who has done any serious research into getting a book published will know the odds are stacked against you in a way that makes Ladbrokes both rub it's hands with glee and sweat uncontrollably in almost equal measure.

It's not all doom and gloom though, some people do write books, some get them published, some make a living at it, some even make millions at it. It's all about persistence, just don't think it will be easy, be ready for the long haul.

Maybe now is a good time to announce I am writing a book. I have plenty of ideas, but I chose to start with a children's book. I say children's, what I mean is the 12-14 year old bracket. The best way to describe it (and trust me, I'm cringing as I type it) is to say that it's in the same vein as Harry Potter (if you haven't heard of Harry Potter, welcome back from Mars, hope you had a nice stay, shame those rovers started joyriding around the place, totally ruins the ambience). I can hear you groaning already. No, I'm not jumping on the bandwagon, I'm desperately trying not to copy anything and be original (almost to the point of obsessive compulsive magnitudes) .

It does feature wizards, it does have a small boy as the lead character, it does have a variety of races that are common to fantasy novels, and it does have magic. It's meant a lot of time delving into mythology, which I find very interesting, plenty of time in libraries (which I love) and lots of head scratching. I just fired up my trusty StarOffice (a Christmas present -- I'm so geek -- which replaced my copy of OpenOffice) and checked the stats. Despite not having written much in 6 months, it currently stands at 25, 439 words. That's more than anything else I've written, ever. It's about two-thirds of the way through the story, which means it's short by about a 50,000 words (although children's novels tend to be much shorter than adult fiction, coming in around the 40,000 word mark, so maybe I'm not doing as bad as I think), but I'm not too worried as I know there's plenty of detail, character and backstory that needs to be added.

Anyway, I thought I'd share that with you, perhaps in the hope that someone will pop in and ask how it's coming every now and then, who knows. Incidently, I am aiming to get back to writing a bit more fiction and some articles rather than just keeping on at the blog, the site was designed more as a means of sharing the former rather than the latter (not that you can tell that from its current state).