The First Five Pages Of Shaper…

…are up at Adventures In YA and Children’s Publishing. Available here, embarrassing typos and all. I’ll be responding to the long, very kindly and constructive critique already left by editor Susan Sipal (she nailed each and every one of the bloody typos – that’ll teach me not to use a laptop to proof read instead of printing it out) later when I’m home from work.

Meanwhile, if any regular readers want a taste of what I’ve been making all this fuss about,  now’s your chance to tackle the first five 1250 words. Which may well be all you need.

500 Words Challenge

I’m back on the wagon with my YA Fiction (or 10-14 or whatever age group might vaguely be interested in reading it) novel.

I’m still at the notes and planning stage but the outline (about 15,000 words of plot, fragments of dialog, events, asides and so on drawn from almost nightly story-telling sessions to dudelet from the first two and a half months of the year) is almost complete. I added another 600 words of the last-but-two chapter this morning thanks to an early ‘alarm call’ from little elf.

So I’m rewarding/challenging myself with the following:

The real heavy lifting – a first complete draft – is still to come, of course…

P.S. Justgiving, anyone? I’m still doing that thumping great walk thing across Hadrian’s Wall.