Oh, dear, it has been a long time, hasn't it?
The truth is that I've simply been very busy. I don't have many readers to my blog, so I shifted my priorities. Why? Because I needed to focus on my story!
I've had other private things going on to deal with as well, such as a car accident that totaled my car and subsequently wrangling a new car; it happens to be a Toyota. If you have seen the news lately you know how these things are working out for me in general...
At any rate, the first draft was finished, and currently is having a first-pass to clean it up. Right now the manuscript, which started at 112,240 words, is now at 108,481 words, for a cut of 3,759 words, and I'm still in the first half of the document.
As I hack and slash and reword I then divvy up some of the work I've reviewed to English-major wife, who in turn hacks and slashes and rewords and sends it back to me to re-integrate to the manuscript.
So I haven't disappeared. I'm simply keeping busy doing what I should be doing. Writing!
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Sunday, January 3, 2010
New Novel Progress: Heading into the New Year
It's been awhile since I updated this blog. It's not for lack of writing, though. I even managed to update my other blogs periodically. Primarily I hadn't updated here because I was working on the first draft.
My previous goal was to finish before December so I could have a quick editing pass completed before New Year's. That goal was missed by a month. I managed to actually "complete" the first draft within hours of midnight on December 31st, so I managed to complete my first draft of a novel in the twilight of the year 2009.
What did I end up with? A manuscript with (according to OpenOffice) a word count of 112,240 words, which isn't bad when you consider that fantasy/science fiction is supposed to be approximately 100,000 words.
The story needs a lot of work. There are plenty of places to tweak and bend, and I said I "completed" the draft because I'm not entirely sure I like the ending; it may need heavy rewriting before it's something I like personally. After I have a quick and dirty chop session I plan on having a beta reader with far more of a clue about grammar read through it and give a brutal set of suggestions of what to alter and rewrite.
I've worked hard on it, but I also work to not become so attached to my baby that I'm unwilling to chop out what needs to be chopped out to make a story that other people would enjoy. I wrote a story that I enjoyed, and even then I enjoyed it as I went along writing it. I haven't re-read it to see if I can enjoy it without having to work on it along the way yet (and no doubt spend much of that cringing while wondering what I was thinking when I wrote XYZ).
It's a first attempt. It's rough. It may not be something usable, but if there's a nugget of usable story then I'd like to salvage it. My wife pointed out that in saying things like this it sounds like I'm fishing for compliments; I'm actually trying to work against that. I have read many many accounts of people who are afraid to give criticism because authors aren't looking for creative criticism as much as they are praise.
I don't want artificial praise. If you like it, let me know, that's fine. But I want the rough parts to be sanded away, and parts that need fixing to be fixed. I can't try to sell this without having something that someone besides me enjoys, and glaring mistakes or issues should be smoothed out before that. I need my beta readers to know that I want honest feedback. There may be things I disagree with but for the most part I want to know about what others think does and doesn't work in the story.
But this is going off topic. The point is that as things go, I have a skeleton of a story, and I managed to complete it just shy of 2010. Now I want to spend the next couple months with editing and polishing a bit. Then comes the fun part...collecting rejection slips!
On the other hand while shopping for additions to the rejection slip pile maybe I'll start a new story...but that's getting ahead of myself. With luck, maybe I'll have an update soon on the status of my editing work.
My previous goal was to finish before December so I could have a quick editing pass completed before New Year's. That goal was missed by a month. I managed to actually "complete" the first draft within hours of midnight on December 31st, so I managed to complete my first draft of a novel in the twilight of the year 2009.
What did I end up with? A manuscript with (according to OpenOffice) a word count of 112,240 words, which isn't bad when you consider that fantasy/science fiction is supposed to be approximately 100,000 words.
The story needs a lot of work. There are plenty of places to tweak and bend, and I said I "completed" the draft because I'm not entirely sure I like the ending; it may need heavy rewriting before it's something I like personally. After I have a quick and dirty chop session I plan on having a beta reader with far more of a clue about grammar read through it and give a brutal set of suggestions of what to alter and rewrite.
I've worked hard on it, but I also work to not become so attached to my baby that I'm unwilling to chop out what needs to be chopped out to make a story that other people would enjoy. I wrote a story that I enjoyed, and even then I enjoyed it as I went along writing it. I haven't re-read it to see if I can enjoy it without having to work on it along the way yet (and no doubt spend much of that cringing while wondering what I was thinking when I wrote XYZ).
It's a first attempt. It's rough. It may not be something usable, but if there's a nugget of usable story then I'd like to salvage it. My wife pointed out that in saying things like this it sounds like I'm fishing for compliments; I'm actually trying to work against that. I have read many many accounts of people who are afraid to give criticism because authors aren't looking for creative criticism as much as they are praise.
I don't want artificial praise. If you like it, let me know, that's fine. But I want the rough parts to be sanded away, and parts that need fixing to be fixed. I can't try to sell this without having something that someone besides me enjoys, and glaring mistakes or issues should be smoothed out before that. I need my beta readers to know that I want honest feedback. There may be things I disagree with but for the most part I want to know about what others think does and doesn't work in the story.
But this is going off topic. The point is that as things go, I have a skeleton of a story, and I managed to complete it just shy of 2010. Now I want to spend the next couple months with editing and polishing a bit. Then comes the fun part...collecting rejection slips!
On the other hand while shopping for additions to the rejection slip pile maybe I'll start a new story...but that's getting ahead of myself. With luck, maybe I'll have an update soon on the status of my editing work.
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