Perspective: The Reckoning approaches

So that's Revolution finished, part four of my new novel Perspective. Well, the first draft at least.

It was another section that evolved in unexpected ways once I got into it. A little unsettling at times too. I ended up changing the name of a whole group of people once I realised their original name coincidentally had disturbing historical resonances, given what was happening to them in Revolution.

I also finished the section at a completely different moment than I was initially planning, which makes it more effective. The two chapters I moved should also make a much more interesting opening to Reckoning too.

Tomorrow starts the full planning for section five, Reckoning. I've got most of it sketched out, but not quite sure of the order of a few things. I like having it vaguely structured in my mind before I start out, even though it usually evolves quite differently once I get into it.

I'm writing Perspective using the wonderful Scrivener software, as I did for my first novel, The Stream. It seems to match the way I think and has helped me keep everything in order - not only the book itself, but also my research notes. It's great to be able to insert photos of pages I wanted to reference.

I started writing it on a Windows laptop, but have now fully transferred to my new MacBook Pro. It's great the way it syncs via Dropbox between whatever platform I want to work on. Quite often during the day I do the bulk of the writing on the Mac, and then use the Scrivener app on my iPad or iPhone to review in the evening, or when out and about.

I checked the word count of each of the sections I've written so far and was surprised to find how uniform in size they are, all between 16,000 and 18,000 words. More by luck than judgement. Let's see how section five goes.

I've also been doing quite a lot of reviewing of the earlier sections while working on Revolution, partly to ensure consistency of style and characterisation. I've also been using the Grammarly grammar checking software on all the sections to help catch any stupid mistakes and bad habits that I might be slipping into. I'm glad I invested in a subscription, it helped me spot quite a few things I might have missed, and made me question a few things too. Highly recommended, I'm using it as I'm going along now.

I've also been giving the Hemingway checker a play too. Not as impressive as Grammarly, but has helped highlight my overuse of adverbs, so I've been using that as a final check. I'm sure I've ended up with a much cleaner and easier to read revised draft now.

My most regular mistake is the number of times I use the words 'just' and 'really'. I really just have to stop doing that.

Right, back to planning the last section. I'm looking forward to seeing what happens, some of it will be a surprise to me, I'm sure.