How do YOU write? Part 1

When you write, how do you do it?

Do you have your own office in the house, brimming with notebooks and papers and sundries, steaming mug of coffee on the desk next to you as you type away? Or is the coffee replaced with a chilled glass of wine?

Do you curl up in a chair by the fireplace, laptop open before you?

Do you set word count goals for each week? Each day? Do you outline your story first?

Since learning about the world of self-publishing, I have made a point of reading dozens of novels by indie authors, in addition to a few big name books that had been on my to-read list for some time. So far one my very favorite experiences in this endeavor has been with The Touchstone Trilogy by Andrea K Host. The story of how these books came to be written is a fun and intriguing one.

Host explains it like this:

"Touchstone started off as a fiction blog. My initial concept was simply to write every day of a person's life, no matter how boring that day was - to not skip the things that writers usually elide or compact for the sake of easy reading.

There was no planning whatsoever to start off with, just a girl, and stepping her through a gate and every day I discovered what happened next. This is pretty much how I usually write, for the first chapter or so of my books - I rarely have an ending in mind when I start.

But naturally I think about what could be coming as I write, and usually by chapter three or so I have some idea of some of the major events we're heading for. Often the explanation for all the things going on don't come along until later, though.

With Touchstone particularly, a great deal of what happened revolved around me thinking of something interesting, writing about it, and then when I bored of that, thinking up a new spanner to throw in the works. I didn't know what a Touchstone was actually _for_, for instance, until Lira showed up."

I remember reading that her fiction blog had only one subscriber who stuck with it for the entire year, but she kept writing, because each and every day, that one person showed up to read. I owe that person my gratitude, because that story (with some tweaking to accommodate novel format) has since been published as the poignant, fun and alluring Touchstone trilogy. 

Andrea K Host's website can be found here