Words About Writing

Well, so much for doing A-to-Z. I forgot about it for two days. But, in the spirit of it: EDITING CHALLENGES The way I'm doing this edit follows a "top-down" system I learned about, actually through a Nanowrimo virtual write-in. Four steps - 1. Read the manuscript and MAKE NOTES. Notes should be coded for whether the suggested change will effect a) the whole story (or at least multiple chapters), b) just the current scene/chapter, or c) just that sentence/line. 2. Tackle the notes that will effect the whole story. These could be big cuts, added scenes, or themes that stretch throughout the story. 3. Now, tackle the notes that will effect a scene or chapter. After the big cuts from step 2, there may be fewer of them left. 4. Finally, go through all those nit-picky line notes. Clean up the language. Make it flow. Theoretically, step one should only take a couple days, but this vomit draft needs a lot of work. I hope to get step one up to the mid-point of this WIP today. Tha...

Over a week later, and all the files are moved into their new home. I've matched up the comments as best I can, and I'm okay with that. A lot of the comments were notes to "delete this" or "use a better word" so they could be anything and I didn't stress too much about them. I'm still 6,000 words short, but they're there somewhere. Or, they would have been deleted anyway. A word count is a flexible thing. I'm not bothered too much. I want to play with the timeline a little and see if I can come up with a format I like. I got busy recreating the novel and forgot to pull out timing information. So I'll do a little playing with that part of it these next few days and then... FINALLY jumping into the book my reader had. It's been turned into a shared file, so I can start with the notes that are there and just keep going as they finish the task. I'm looking forward to that. It gives me motivation. 

I was doing great.  As planned when I last posted, I was working on a timeline for my magnum opus - going through scenes to find the timing of everything and dropping the information into a gantt chart, making minor changes to the text. That's been my last ... four days. Then yesterday I set up and turned on my computer, went about my normal "getting ready for the day" routine, casually passing my computer and opening scrivener, then the file, and saw it open to where I had left off the day before. Fine. No problem. I was doing something in a different part of the house (no one else was around) and when I came back, my computer was asleep (of course). No problem. Tap it to wake it up. Scrivener is still open, but the document I was in was blank! No words! I clicked on the document above it in the manuscript folder. Blank. The next one - blank. So I panicked and closed Scrivener. I opened it again and thought, "Maybe it's a visual thing." The project still sh...

It's no good.  This dead girl story is wrecking me. Until my other draft comes back from my reader I need to change my pace. I'm going to pick back up my "magnum opus" (as I call it).  This is the one that I worked on last winter. It's very big and needs a lot of work. Of course, I don't want to get too deeply into it, because I must edit the one from my reader as soon as it comes back. I'll open it, and maybe I'll start to work on the timeline and characters a little. I recall that while I was writing the story more characters were coming into play that did not get a character sheet. Doing it during a writing contest meant all my words went into the document, not the background information. One thing about this current challenge being time-driven: I've worked on the character sheets and been adding to them as things come up. It is actually helpful to have them right there when I want to decide who will do what in a scene! So it will probably help ...

Do any of my fellow readers get caught in the emotion of the story they are working on? I think that might be part of my problem with this one. It is SO dark, and I'm writing about heavy stuff that I kind of know nothing about, I think that it is sapping my energy. These last few days, I want nothing more than to sleep. I need to write 2 hours a day (average that, at least) but as soon as I'm vertical I just want to lie back down on the bed and read or play games on my phone. I have no energy. I think it's all going into this book that will never see the light of day.  I'm exhausted. But I'm writing. I finally asked my reader, and they admitted that they were only working on it "in spurts". So I pushed for a commitment to finish before the month is out. I need to get into that one. There's joy, and illumination, and friendships in that one. This current WIP is the loneliest thing I've written. Of course, I'm the creator, so I'm filling my t...

Stab me with a fork, this is interminable! First, TWO MONTHS since my last post? How did that happen? Second, I'm back in the old WIP I was trying to finish before Nanowrimo. 😥 Yes, I won Nanowrimo. The story, as I felt, will never see the light of day. There's some story, some musing, some theory, some personal exposition... Maybe I could salvage a short story out of it or something.  That's a possibility. Hmm... So, I'm back to the WIP I did NOT finish before November. Now, though, I'm pushing myself to write every day. Maybe not as much as I did during Nanowrimo, but at least daily, something.  I'm getting closer. New issues cropped up that I realized needed to be resolved before arriving at the conclusion, so that's where I am now. But I'm closer. I can feel it. This month, maybe early February.

 A week into Nano and I'm almost on track. I'm still working on my other WIP, so my attention is divided and my time is divided, but I'm logging words every day, so that's good. I'm SO CLOSE to ending the other WIP. I can't wait for that moment, when I can finally sort out the mess of this year's Nano work. I'm putting words into Scrivener, but each chunk doesn't flow together and I'm still not sure what this book will be about. By that I mean style. The subject is chosen, but will it be fiction, memoir, a bit of both? Hard to say. Meanwhile I'm fighting a bug which means sleeping when possible, which means NOT writing as much as I need to.  My nanowrimo counter shows that I'm almost 5,000 words behind where I need to be to finish on time. That's the worst start I've ever had during any Nanowrimo ever. I'll make it up. I just need to get the characters home in my other WIP so that my brain can switch gears. How's it going ...

I sorted out the problem from my last post. It had its purpose and I'm getting closer to the end. Closer and closer. But it still feels like the moment in a dream when you think you're coming out of a tunnel only to find that the light you were aiming for was just a light within the tunnel illuminating the next section of the tunnel.  My intention was to finish in September and spend October prepping for Nanowrimo. I participated in one of the Nanowrimo virtual write-ins for Nano Prep, and it was helpful. It's giving ideas. And I've had additional ideas, so that now I keep the notebook for this next work handy "just in case". But I still have to finish my WIP! I still struggle with lack of motivation, so some days are weak on the writing side. I need to fix that if I'm going to do 50,000 words in November! I have started writing down my word count, but since my current efforts include editing, it's a bit of a bogus count. I want to be done. I need to b...

I wish I had cancelled some things to make more time to write, as I suggested at the end of my last post... OVER A MONTH AGO. It's August, and no, I didn't finish it. Life intervened. There were some chaotic things happening in my neighborhood, plus a bout of depression, plus a few "official" issues to resolve. And now we are in a second actual lockdown. You'd think a lockdown would make it easier to find time to write, but I'm lost in that space called "lack of motivation". I've been there often enough in the past few months that it needs a better name. It's basically my second home. A place shouldn't be a "lack of," but what is the presence? Can I call it the Space of Ennui? The Headspace of Ennui? Or am I simply possessed and controlled by ennui? I think it's more complicated than that, but it doesn't matter. The fact is, progress is slow. Oh, so slow. Getting out of bed these days is an act of will power. ...

(The question mark in my title is for the word "nearing".) In my edit of this WIP, I am "nearing" the climax. Again, though, there are a lot of synopses where action should be, so it's more work than it appears. My scrivener folder shows only a few documents left, but they are the BIG part - where resolution happens or doesn't. In fact, I wrote three different possible endings! I know which ending I like best, though, so I'm looking forward to getting there. I just need to sort out the details of how, precisely, my protagonist reaches that point. All of this aside, my brain has been more in the book that I sent out to beta-readers last fall. I set it up for a major edit, then wrote this WIP instead. In the current state of the world, with people staying home and dealing in some way with a world-wide crisis, the epic quest I'm currently editing seems redundant. When every day is a minefield, who would want to read about a different kind of min...

So this is a writer's life. I tend to simply not post anything when there is little to say, but if I am blogging for integrity, to share - or remember - my process and how it changes, I should share good and bad. And stagnation. I have had a rough week or two, with no energy or motivation to do anything. Running errands in the morning leaves me wiped out for the rest of the day. It happens that way at times, and this is one of those times. As for the WIP, I had reached one of those scenes that was written as a detailed synopsis instead of an actual scene. I was able to write the first part with reasonable ease, but struggled when action changed. Switching to paper and pen helped. I was able to start clean without the synopsis on the screen nagging my thought process. I think it is getting too long, though. I know I need to just get it down. All of it. I can cut and cut and cut in the next edit. But that is sometimes easier said than done. When sitting upright feels like a c...

As is so often the case, life got in the way of my best intentions. C'est la vie. I am beginning a first-re-read of the Nanowrimo manuscript, however. I am well behind what I thought was my schedule, and that's okay. Until I pitch a book and have an agent or editor or publisher to answer to, adjusting my writing schedule to make room for all the crises and emergencies that arise in everyday life is okay. Back on track, though. One, two, three, Here we go!

Well, THAT didn't work! I simply cannot wrap my brain around the editing WIP. I can think of two possibilities. Either: My most recent novel put my brain in a futuristic space that was so extremely different from this simpler story that needs editing that I am unable to get back into its more realistic world to edit. Or... I did a bad thing by breaking out all the scenes into those that need big changes and those that are okay with minor touch-ups. When I opened the edit WIP, it was hard to get a sense of direction or even get into edit mode. Maybe it's a touch of both. After weeks of dissatisfaction at my mental immobility verging on depression, followed by some sincere prayer time, I have decided that I will skip this edit and move into review and initial edit of the Nanowrimo Novel. That shall begin this week, if I can manage my schedule as planned. Best of luck in your plans during this new year!

We all have distractions. The trick is finding a way to move forward around or through the distractions. Lately, life has taken a turn and dropped an extra plate in my lap. Not a problem in the long run, but the last week or two has been rather chaotic trying to keep all the plates spinning on the pole and ending up dropping one or two. The good news is, I actually made some good progress in my WIP, I think. At least it's getting organized so that I can , at some point, make "good progress". The slow news is in the editing work. I sorted out my editing work in Scrivener as I needed, but then stalled. I had made a list of things that need to be done to the manuscript, and struggled with the next step. So today, I'm moving beyond that. It's very freeing to release yourself from your own rules. Who says things need to be done in a certain order? So I sat down with the printed manuscript to start putting my hand-written changes into the document, prior to diss...

...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...

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...