March 29th 2017: I have slipped behind my 1,000 words per day. It is now day 54 and I’m averaging out at 990 words. I should be able to make it up in the next chapter, which will be nineteen. Today’s work was pretty hard, as I feel totally lacking in energy. I struggled, but did get a new idea which adds to the mystery and that has gone into a piece of dialogue. I had to spend some of this morning, reading out aloud from where I’d left off. The thing I’m always on the look-out for is repeated words and I found one or two along the way. The only effective way you can spot those is by reading out aloud, and I think it’s well worth it because that one seemingly small editing job improves the language and its flow hugely. Time for a bit of ectoplasm, I think, or is this just a bad cold? I’ll be writing about ectoplasm in the next chapter.
