Thomas Emson writes horror. He is the author of Maneater, Skarlet and a host of other books contracted to Snowbooks due to be published over the next four years. He’s a joy to work with, and is good enough to share his working practices with us here. Here are his words on writing Skarlet:

THE “SKARLET” ROUTINE.

“THE writing of Skarlet started, as you can see from the sheet, on February 22 this year, with 390 words. That week I wrote just under 5,300 words. I set myself weekly targets. They’re better for me than daily ones. If I had a daily 1,500 words target, and I missed a day, I’d be frustrated. But with a weekly target of between 5,000 and 10,000 words, it doesn’t matter if I miss a day: I can always catch up. If you look at that first month, you’ll see I did miss a few days: March 5, March 16, a few here and there. But, as you can see from the weekly totals, I always caught up: 12,313 that second week; more than 9,000 words on each of the other two weeks. The 36,305 figure is my word total for the month. The second month of writing, you’ll see, resulted in more than 45,000 words – and just one day off: March 21. I finished the first draft on April 26 with 2,753 words – written, there, in red. I revised a little in the following days, but then took some time out, focusing on other projects. And for the past couple of months I’ve been going re-writing and revising that first draft.”