This Week I... Finished the first draft of my current WIP, The 7th Child!

I sort of hated it towards the end BUT I do know how to fix it!

my little kitchen Christmas tree with home-made decorations. Image is mine

Hello folks! How are you all doing? It’s been wet, wild and windy here in my little corner of England this week. I’m now in full festive mood as you can see from my little kitchen Christmas tree! I do have a bit of an addiction to small potted Christmas trees and have four of them now growing outside. This one will stay in a pot for a few years before it’s big enough to join the others. The main tree won’t go up just yet but I am starting to decorate each room with old, much-loved and hand-made decorations!

The big news this week is that I finished the first draft of the current WIP, The 7th Child. This is the family mystery I decided to write while giving myself a break from editing the Black Hare Valley series. I finished it on Saturday night with very mixed feelings! More on that in a moment but what else happened this week?

This Week I…

Read: I finally finished reading Lark Rise To Candleford by Flora Thompson. You can read my Storygraph review here. I have not started a new read yet as I am currently reading through my paperback proof copy of The Dark Finds You to double check for any typos, or formatting errors! It’s looking good so far!

Watched: Though I am still watching Shetland on BBCiPlayer, I have also been devouring the new episodes of Stranger Things! No spoilers here from me, but I thought the first four episodes were superb and I cannot wait for the next instalment. I particularly love the way it covers all the bases of effective storytelling. It’s always mysterious, we are always desperate to know more. It’s always fast-paced, jumping from one action packed scene to another. It is always funny, making us laugh out loud as a family, and God, does it need the humour! And it is always sweet and touching with genuinely engaging character development!

Listened to: I fancied a bit of Liam Gallagher in the car this week. I think Everything's Electric is one of his best solo tracks!

Wrote: I didn’t write anything on Medium this week though I have a few pieces planned. I just haven’t had time to write them which is annoying. I finished the first draft of The 7th Child, my family mystery drama. It needs a lot of work! I have now gone back to editing Black Hare Valley, starting with the 5th book first. That’s because it’s only got a first draft and I need to get it to third draft to match most of the others! Once that is achieved I will be doing final edits on book 1 before it goes to my editor! Exciting!!

Finished the first draft of my current WIP, The 7th Child: I mentioned last week that I was starting to struggle with this book. It’s a book I planned years ago, with the plot, characters and setting all in place before I started writing. I felt confident about how to write it too: a first person POV from one character in the present, alternating with third person POVs from all the characters in the past. Towards the end this started to feel wrong. It was still easy enough to write as I had all the scenes and sequence of events set out… But, something felt off. I wasn’t enjoying it. It was somehow, jarring.

It’s never fun to realise you may have told a story in a way that doesn’t quite work and it’s frustrating trying to work out a better way. But, after a long walk with my dogs and a long writing chat with my eldest daughter, I realised what to do. I have decided to tell the whole story from one character’s POV, even the past bits. The past bits will be told in a very different way but the events will still happen. I had already built the main character up as a potentially unreliable narrator and this change will really cement that. We will only get his view and we will never be sure what is true and what is not.

I breathed a huge sigh of relief when I realised that would work better and though I was going to have a break, I am actually going to get straight back into it. I will now be editing the Black Hare Valley series as my priority writing project because I need to start releasing them in 2026, and The 7th Child will be my second project. I am really looking forward to the big rewrite!

That’s it for this week’s news. As always thank for being here and if you fancy checking out my next release The Dark Finds You you can now pre-order both the ebook and paperback! Release date is 9th January!