Words About Writing

("Progress" coordinates with the AtoZ challenge, if I was actually doing it.) I finally finished the Story Level edit.  It felt like it took a lot longer than it needed to, but actually, I had marked in my planner my goal dates and I was right on target! According to my Camp Nanowrimo goal, though, I am way behind. Some good days, some bad days, but the productive and underproductive days haven't balanced out yet. At this rate, according to Nanowrimo I'll meet my goal on May 8. Yikes! Today begins the Scene/Chapter Level edit. I had allotted just six days for this, but I now know for a fact I'll have 2 busy (underproductive) days in there, and might completely lose a day of editing due to LIFE. So I'm granting myself until the 25th. I've never NOT met a Nanowrimo goal yet. It seems silly. If you set a goal that's just you against a calendar, rearrange your time! It was in my power to set a goal that fit my schedule and I did so. The goal is achievable....

About a week ago I finally finished that review/revision of Draft One. It's still Draft One. This was just a once-over that included some filling in of details. Some added tension, some improved dialog. It's still a bit of a mess, but the plot hangs together. I finished it just in time for my schedule to explode for the next month-plus. For now I'll do short writing projects to keep up the practice, and then in March or April I'll pick it back up and re-read it with fresh eyes. Prepare to edit! Meanwhile, I'm reading a lot.  Now, if only I could find a good resource for short, simple, writing prompts... 

You know how I wasn't sure what to do next with my WIP? I figured out a plan of action. Before I dive in and do yet another edit, I have one person reading through to make suggestions on which sections could stand some beefing up or fat-trimming. Meanwhile, for the last few days, I've been itching to just get in and start skimming it myself. But today I came to a solution that will work. I think. It would be a waste for me to go through and start looking for places to fix, when someone else is doing that for me. After I get back their notes, I can tackle everything. In the meantime, what's a writer to do? I'm floundering. Solution: Review a different book. I have five novels in various draft stages in my computer. I don't want to get sucked too deeply into a side project, though, so I'm going to take the one at the simplest stage and fix some background work. One of the five novels is not even a complete first draft yet. I started it to try my hand at "lett...

Feedback has started rolling in from my Beta-readers. I'm learning a lot. First off, it's valuable feedback, but the first two readers to finish did not do as I had expected. Notes are not as in-depth as I had requested, and one even wasted time pointing out typos or missed word placement, which I distinctly said not to look for. But I do have a couple things that I know I need to fix for the next draft, and I'm so glad I'm doing this before seeking an agent, etc.! I do know that the two who have supposedly finished will not be readers for me at this stage on future books. One gave broad, sweeping notes, and said that the grammatical issues were a distraction for her. The other seemed to think of it like reading a pre-release - just make a couple notes and give a review? I would love to have them read at a later stage on a future book. It's all good information for me. This is a learning process. I think next time I might ask on my blog, or on twitter, and s...

Somehow, for this book - which I imported into Scrivener into a basic novel format - Scrivener is not functioning as well as the one I wrote in the Nanowrimo novel configuration on Scrivener. My searches based on custom meta-data yielded no results ( this was a key way that I sorted my character arcs before leaving my Nano draft ) and the cork board... well... Not actually a Scrivener problem, but a learning curve for me. The cork board only works within each folder. So for future books, I will not divide into sections until after the entire draft is done.That way I can go to the cork board and move things around before sorting them into groups! If you don't use Scrivener, sorry for all the software details. I'm still getting used to it myself. Last week, I did make some major changes to two minor characters. Not exactly combining them into one, I gave one character's dominant characteristic to the other, who was better-suited to it, frankly, and modified the first to...

Whew! Bought a printer last week. I had already hand-written enough to knock almost 20 pages off the print job, but what a relief to be able to print out the bulk of my manuscript. As of this morning, I have finished reading through the whole thing. The steps I am following for this first revision are: Write my original intention/goal for the first draft. Read the entire first draft (in a different format from how I entered it - handwritten and in print). Read it, stopping only for general, broad-stroke notes, not nitpicking. Write a synopsis of the story I just finished reading. Use the original intention, the notes, and the synopsis as a starting point for the second draft. Personally, after writing the synopsis, I re-read it, then highlighted bits of the synopsis that I think could be bigger plot points. Things that I recalled as I wrote the synopsis, but that seemed downplayed in the actual manuscript. Sidenote: The first step to this process that I followed seemed unne...

I'm at the point of revising the first draft of a book I wrote last summer. This was the first work of fiction I attempted, and it reads like it. Haha. That's why we edit. The problem is that I don't have a printer yet. I moved last summer, and gave my bulky, heavy printer to friends who had helped with the move. I don't need one often, so I thought I'd see how long I could go. For this first revision, I'm following advice of many writers, who suggest printing out the whole thing, re-reading it to familiarize yourself with the story - this is assuming it has been sitting on a back burner for a while - and then tackling major issues first. Well, I can't seem to find a print-shop in my new city that handles anything smaller than giant advertising banners. Also, every electronics store I've checked out seems to be focused more on TVs and cell-phones. I guess I need to track down how people get their computer needs met here. Maybe the computer places a...