Sarah Potter Writes

By the end of January, I  felt a huge affinity with that poor frozen palm weighed down by snow in the garden, as my fingers were often too cold to type and my brain was full of sludge. But I persevered, not wanting to make a fool of myself by abandoning Novel Writing Winter after one month.

Today, with one more week of February to go, I’ve reached the 12,000-word mark. This takes me to the end of Part I of my work in progress, which closes on a cliffhanger. At this point, I can officially announce that I’ve fallen in love with my novel, and there are flowers like this appearing in my garden to reflect my more positive mood.

I’ve decided to write rather a random post this time, so what I’m going to list next, are the basic reference books I’ve used for this project so far.

• Oxford Dictionary of English – Third Edition
• Collins Pocket Reference Thesaurus In  A-Z Form
• The Writer’s Digest Character-Naming Sourcebook – by Sherrilyn Kenyon
• Deadly Doses – a writer’s guide to poisons – by Serita Deborah Stevens

And now for something completely different. In the March edition of a respected writing publication (that will remain nameless), I found two errors in one sentence — a wrong word order and a wrong word choice.

(quote) “Your stories come from often quite a deep, buried part of your unconscious.”

Whoops! Spot the mistakes time. One journalist having a bad day, methinks D: