charles barrow's writing

Now I'm not normally one to recommend products publicly (unless they are Moleskine notebooks) but I have to go on record singing the praises of a piece of software called Calibre . It's free. Go get it now. It's a little miracle machine. I feed in the pages of my story (in a .doc format) and it spits out an eBook. I repeat the process with a jpeg image for the cover and I get an eBook with a photo cover. Bloody fantastic. I turned my story into a PDF, a .mobi file for Kindles and an .epub version which I can read on my Kobo. My very own eBook, with cover, in my Kobo library snug between Asimov and Conan Doyle. Oh happy day. ps I also (in a very small way) helped to fund The People's E-Book on Kickstarter, as I saw it as, perhaps, an investment in my own future. Well done to Hol Art Books for getting this project funded. It's another miracle piece of software that'll turn my pages into eBooks. I mean to try it out in due course.

The first draft of the story took about six weeks to write – so much for turning out 3,000 words a day, everyday. I am not a fast writer, by which I mean two hours of solid work and concentration might produce only two hundred words. I tend to get lost in ‘word world’ and I can agonise endlessly over the exact right one that I want. I have decided to be less rigorous in this blog. In practice I write long hand in a lined notebook using a pencil – Moleskine notebook and a grade B, red and black barrelled Staedtler pencil (because these things are important, and I’m always interested to know how other writers produce their pages). This method of writing is much slower, I realise, than typing directly onto a screen, but I feel a closer connection with the work this way. Once I have a scene or two down on paper I will then type them up, editing a bit as I go. So, as of today I have 25 scenes written, typed up and waiting to be turned into my second draft.