On it goes

Woken by a hungry cat who would have dragged me out of bed by the hair if she could.  Not too impressed with a 4am start to begin with, but picked up where I left off yesterday which was tidying up the death in chapter 5 and getting ready to launch into chapter 6.  It's nice to spend some time with Max et al again. 

The thing that struck me most yesterday was that I've placed some explanatory detail too early in the picture and will have to move it to a much later slot.  There's no point calling it a mystery if the reader knows what's going on before anyone else does.  Still, I'll leave it where it is until I find the right spot to place it.

At less than 32,000 words, there's still a long way to go and I can see many revisits to add more and more back-story as it grows, but that's where the document strategy comes in.  I write every chapter as its own document so I know exactly where I need to be to edit a certain detail.  It also makes it more imperative to write something long enough to be called a chapter and something that is almost self contained within a chapter setting.  I have the notion to end every chapter at a point where something dramatic has happened but there is still no explanation.  There won't be any proper explanation until the very last chapter and then the big finale.  But that's in many thousands of words time.

On it goes and I'm still really into the story, so I hope I can turn out something that other people can also be really into.

Meanwhile, on the design side of things, progress is still slow with the Kindle cross stitch books, but I have had a sale on the Union Jack Beanie.  I can't tell where the buyer actually is, but it was bought from Amazon.com not .co.uk so there's a good chance they weren't in the UK.  Goes in completely the opposite direction to what I would have predicted for the union jack, but if there's one thing you can never predict it's people on the Internet.  I haven't done much promoting of the book either, so it was a nice surprise to see the new month reports started off with the beanie pattern. 

Things on the website remain painfully slow.  Search engines aren't reporting it yet, which is half the battle, but I can see from the usage stats that it has been spidered many times now.  I'm also aware that the charts available aren't mind blowing, but most are designed to be made by or for kids as a fun thing.  They aren't meant to be fine art with a needle.  I had much more success selling them on eBay and might end up doing just that in the interests of charity fundraising.  I can't afford the initial costs just yet though.  Soon.  I've set myself this goal and I'm going to achieve it no matter how many brick walls I run into on the way.