You can see one of Bratislava’s most prominent sights in this picture: the Novy Most, or “New Bridge”, built, as you might be able to guess by its appearance, by the Soviets during the communist era. They’re also responsible for the monstrous collection of bland apartment buildings across the other side of the river (which is the Danube, by the way). You’re seeing a picture of Bratislava because I’m in the middle of writing what I keep calling my “Bratislava novel”, since an actual title hasn’t made itself known to me yet.

I thought I’d give you a bit of an update on how my progress on writing this novel is going. I’ve been mentioning it on and off for a while, mainly because I keep starting and stopping. But with my chance for a second attempt at the ABNA contest drawing near, I’m really keen to get it finished as soon as possible, and hopefully have enough time to give it a good edit before the due date. If you’ve read this blog much at all, you’ll know I’m a great procrastinator and best motivated by deadlines, and that seems to be working again now.

I’ve set myself a goal of writing a minimum of 1,300 words per day, which should give me enough time to get the rest of the novel done and still allow sufficient time for revision and edits. (Well, not quite sufficient, but better than nothing.) And for the past four or five days, I’ve been exceeding this goal. Woo-hoo! I’ve been wondering why I’m on such a roll with this writing, and have come up with a few reasons:

• I have a chapter-by-chapter plan for this novel. The plan is not very detailed – just a few sentences for each chapter – but when I sit down to write, I know where it’s going. I’m adding and removing quite a lot of the plan as I go, but then adjusting things later on in the plan, and it certainly seems to be making things easier. Being aware that I don’t have much revision time, following a plan like this really seems to be helping.
• I love the characters. This novel has three equally-shared main characters, and each of them is very different, but I really like them all. Each chapter is told in turn by a different character, so every few days I’m changing perspective, but that’s working well.
• I’m writing in the first person again (but from the three different perspectives). I struggled over this issue with Kanako’s Foreigner and ended up changing the entire novel from first to third person, but this time it seems to be working out better, perhaps because of the three different personalities.

It’s still a fair way to go before I can say this has been a successful novel completion attempt, but with the holidays ahead (and not much to do during them other than relax) I’m feeling reasonably confident. Keep your fingers crossed for me!