In February, I finished my experiment with writing into the dark, and I’ll discuss how I achieved this, along with the response of my favourite beta reader. As you’ve come to expect, I will share my writing stats, days, time, word count and the step-by-step process that I used. Now that I’ve mentioned that, it’s crucial that I point out that I’m following Dean Wesley Smith’s Writing Into the Dark method, which he teaches in a course and in a book. I highly recommend that you check out both of these options if you’re interested in learning this writing into the dark technique.

A few weeks ago, I received an email from Plottr letting me know they were interested in chatting with me on my podcast about plotting and story organisation techniques and how Plottr can benefit both Plotters and Pantsers. Because Plottr is a story organisation tool I thought the interview would be great for this season of The Authorpreneur Podcast because I’m discussing outlining and the pre-writing phase. Also if you’ve been thinking about trying Plottr this might help you decide whether the software is right for you. So, in the show I’m chatting with Troy Lambert about plotting and story organisation techniques with Plottr.

So you’ve created an outline for your novel, and now you’re ready to start writing. Diving into the first draft seems like the first logical step. First, however, I recommend you slow down and edit the outline of your novel. I learned this lesson the hard way after publishing my first-in-series novella.