Words About Writing

...Like Hamlet says, "whether to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune..." Fortune here meaning that fickle demon that offers both good and bad. A new month, new determination. I finished the re-write over a week ago and as planned, I printed the new draft. Then I stalled out. I made a list of things I want to check for. A couple things are kind of big - like seeking places to expand one of the relationships between characters, or expanding the subplot. Otherwise, I want to read for excessive adverbs, unnecessary dialog tags, find my pet words that I use too much. You know, clean house a bit, verbiage-wise. I have read - and this being my first book, everything I'm doing is based on things I've read - that it's not a good use of time to edit for nit-picky details before you are totally satisfied with the story. Because what if you make big changes, and then you have to go back and pick for nits again? But I can't. I tried sitting down wi...

I found the noise that actually disrupts my flow: Loud Construction. There is construction nearby, and I lost about a week of work during the loudest part. I was in the "rewrite the entire book" phase, which has been a wonderful exercise and very helpful. I'm still in that phase. The construction isn't as noisy right now, but I'm sure there will be loud days yet to come. No, April has its own distractions for me, as I focus on two different online writing challenges. These are going well, helping improve my general writing style, and stretch my abilities cross-genres. I'm also testing new voices. But I'm not doing a lot of editing. The rest of this month I'll be more diligent in getting some editing in every week, maybe every other day or something. I don't think I'll fit it in every day. After I finish this editing phase, I'll print out the manuscript again, re-read for technical errors like adverbs and grammatical garbage. Then I thin...