Manuscript is done, now for editing...

It's been quite awhile since I updated the blog. Shame on me!

I didn't drop off the face of the planet, though. I finished the manuscript awhile ago. When I last posted, I was working on synopsis notes. Well, I had it printed out, I reviewed it, even a member of my family went through the manuscript and found more errors to correct.

For the past couple months I've actually been making more progress on the story; I hired a freelance editor, Paula Berinstein from the podcast called The Writing Show, to help me with tuning the storyline and plot points and character arcs. All I can say is that she's shown herself to be worth a LOT more than I paid her.

The beginning of the story has been completely changed to the point where it barely resembles the original opening (and I think it's actually better now.) Right now the work has slowed, slightly, as she's helping me develop mapped out character arcs. That...is...hard. To actually articulate the character arcs and develop them is in no way easy for me. But Paula has been great with helping me understand my weaknesses in this area and helping me find my way through developing this skill a little better. She's been wonderful at mentoring me.

I think my story has an arc for the primary character; the problem is that the secondary (and tertiary) characters have latent character arcs that we're trying to enhance. In the process it should make the story better in the long run.

This manuscript may never sell. The sad fact is that most manuscripts from first-time authors probably do not sell; but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen. I of course hope that an agent will take an interest in the manuscript while I acknowledge that the odds are against me, and from there a publisher may take an interest. What I can say is that after Paula and I put it through the ringer it will at least boost the odds a few percentage points than if I didn't have her helping me.

All I can do now is continue working on the manuscript with Paula and see what the finished product emerges!

Manuscript UPDATE!

Oh geez where do I begin? On August 1st, I finished my first round of edits on the manuscript!

My wife has the last pages now, and she's working on her editing for grammar, clarity, etc. etc...

Once she is done with that, I'll be printing up a copy or two and have a first reader lined up to go through it and give an opinion. I'm psyched!

I hate saying that because someone may read it just before acting as a  first reader and be afraid to give honest feedback if it's negative. But that's okay! I'm psyched because for every person who has written a first draft of a novel, there are ten that sit on their butts and say they want to write a book or novel, but never get around to doing it. By getting not only that first draft done in something like six months but also finishing a round of editing and polishing, I'm ahead of the game. This alone was an accomplishment for me!

I fully expect this to not sell. I'm going to try to shop it, and I'll be disappointed if it doesn't get accepted. But it's a first effort. First novels are hard to sell, new authors are hard to sell, and overall, the realistic picture is never good. It's hard out there! But I still came out ahead, and that's what I'm proud of.

If someone does like the story then it's icing on the cake! I actually wrote a manuscript and made it through a round of editing!

Once my wife is finished with her edits I can give a final word count...now is one of those hard times, waiting for someone else to get time set aside to finish working on it...waiting is never easy.

Manuscript Progress

Me oh my. It looks like quite a bit of time has passed since I posted an update!

Well, there's a reason for that. I've been working on the manuscript.

My last post had me halfway through the first draft with editing with a few chapters sent to a friend to read. I have mixed news on that front; the friend never asked for more pages to read. But she's busy and there wasn't really any expectation for her to have time to read it, so I'm not upset.

This post finds me nearly finished with the first pass of the manuscript. The first draft had 112,240 words; at the moment it has 96,958 words, and I'm making steady progress to the end. OpenOffice tells me that I'm on page 366 of 402, and as I cut words the page count goes down (duh) so the end is a moving target. This does mean that I have less than 40 pages to go before hitting "the end" again!

The important thing is that I fit some time in every day to review and cut. I may not be making huge leaps and bounds every day, but I do try to get at least a third of a page reviewed. I squeeze it in whenever I have some time; before bed, after work, half an hour to an hour over the weekend days. And every paragraph I review is one more paragraph down, one more paragraph closer to being able to sit down and work on another story!

Soon I hope to be able to sit down and start compiling a list of things needed to try shopping it around. I can't say I'm confident that it will find representation, but I do feel it's getting near a point where I need to try. If I wait too long or keep polishing polishing polishing, I'll never get around to trying to sell it, and never slapping a "good enough" label on it to shop it around is about as good as not writing it at all.

Small Edit: The online friend I was referring to above emailed me to ask me not to read into her not asking for more of the manuscript to read; I replied to her (and hope that it's not stuck in her spam filter! Hopefully she'll see this edit and know to look for it!) to let her know that I was just putting that note in the blog entry just to follow up on the previous entry I had. I am in no way offended! I should do an entry on my philosophy of paying dues in trying to get published as an author.

To be honest, I've been neglecting the blog in large part because I've been spending more spare time playing with the manuscript and life activities; the blog would look very boring if I just kept entering counts every day so I was waiting to reach more of a milestone to report. However, I noticed that quite a bit of time had passed since my last entry and while I was chipping away at the manuscript and making progress, it was taking a lot of time to reach that milestone. So I put this entry in.

I fully understand that my friend has been busy; she's had a lot on her plate, and that's just with the things I knew were going on in her life! So I am in no way offended or reading into her not asking for follow up pages. I just wanted her to know that and I in no way intended for her to be hurt or offended by the quick mention in the blog entry here! (Believe me...if I were, I'd say so. I have a tendency to be...blunt?...with my thoughts. The closest I get to subtlety is masking names in the blog entries because I want to maintain some semblance of anonymity in my activities and privacy of others being discussed.)

Edit Edit Edit Edit

I don't dedicate hours a day to editing my first draft. I work on it on and off, in small, digestible chunks. And so far I am proud to say that I'm past the halfway point. Not by leaps and bounds, but significantly past the midway point.

Yay, me!

I just noticed I hadn't updated the blog in awhile and thought I'd add this quick update to show that I haven't quit. Nope, not by a long shot.

I even had an Internet friend ask about reading the story. She had previewed the first chapter (well, what kind of passed for a first chapter), and despite her busy schedule said she'd like to see more. So I packed up the bit that was once-overed by both myself and my wife, converted it to PDF (thank you OpenOffice...) and emailed it to her.

She's a busy woman and she said she couldn't guarantee that she'd get through it soon and that's fine. As far as I am concerned she's reading it for entertainment. Inwardly I'm thinking that if she starts reading it and enjoys it to the endpoint and asks for more of the story, then it is on the right track. That's what a story is supposed to do and that's what you to do get an agent or publisher interested; they pick up the story and you hook them right off the bat, leading them with a finger through the nose from plot point to plot point, and when nature calls they agonize over the decision of whether to wet themselves or finish just one more paragraph.

If she likes it and wants more, I'm on the right track.

If I bore her, then something's not working.

Maybe she'll ask for more, maybe not. Whatever happens I hope she enjoys it as a halfway decent time-killing story.

In the meantime I should be getting back to my editing...

Update on Novel Progress

Wow, it's been awhile since I posted!

Have no fear...I haven't given up, both people who read this blog!

I'm still editing the story. I'm nearly halfway through the current incarnation of the story, and slowly making my way through a turning point.

There have been some setbacks due to personal issues in life taking up my time and energy, so things have slowed a little. But every little bit of progress is progress nonetheless. I have to keep believing that.

In other news, I submitted the opening of the story to a podcast that selected it as one of the manuscripts to review for criticism on their next release coming out this weekend.

To say I'm nervous is a bit of an understatement. The only thing keeping me from obsessing about it are the previously mentioned personal issues. I am hoping the hosts have found some positive points to the story but I know that no story is perfect and I have little doubt there is plenty that can be cleaned up.

That's a nice way of saying that while I don't expect them to love it, I hope they at least like it (or some of it) but I fully expect some need for a thick skin after I get the nerve to listen to the podcast. This was my first attempt at writing a novel-length story. People rarely do well with their first foray into a new skill, and this podcast will no doubt reinforce that lesson!

How's That Editing Thing Coming Along?

Believe it or not I've not abandoned it. I'm past the 1/4 of the novel mark and rapidly heading into the halfway point.

I've been making some changes to my workflow that slowed me down a little...namely the Users Must Hate Me blog talks about the particular changes, so I won't belabor them here.

I'll just say that I have my backups in place again, I have my new writing platform ready to go, and now I'm going to be digging back in to work on the novel! Wish me luck!

Editing Fun and Projects

I cannot claim to be a successful writer. Not in good conscience, anyway. I know that Mur Lafferty advised that a writer is someone who writes, and I'm trying to fill those shoes, but there's a part of me that wants define a writer as someone who writes and has an audience, preferably paid, as a form of validation of success. It's a tangible way to say, "Look! I've made it!"

But I think I'm getting some clue of what it is like for new writers to try to balance practical life with writing life.

I have a day job. Not one that I've been really loving lately, but it pays the mortgage. I've been spending spare time working on the novel I wrote. The first draft ended at 112,240 words. I'm going back through it and trimming material out; as of this moment, OpenOffice is saying that my novel is 108,023 words, so between my wife and I we've cut 4,217 words, and I'm only about a quarter of the way through the manuscript.

(What can I say? Paula B. was right...it takes a lot longer than we think to get through these things!)

The problem I've had lately is that I'm not spending discrete blocks of time working on the novel. While writing it, I would sit for an hour here, an hour there, and have a word count goal of 500 words at least per sitting (usually hitting 1,000 to 2,000). With editing it doesn't work like that (although I could do it in blocks, I just don't). I don't have a concrete goal each session, and setting one like "work until I chop out 500 words" would be silly, as it kind of imposes an arbitrary limitation on the work. I should be trying to edit to make it sound better and not edit just to cut things out ("I like this scene, but I really need to get to bed..." )

The other problem is that I look at my Writers Block Notebook my wife gave me for Xmas and I feel a pang to work on those ideas for stories. I already told myself I can't work on two of these at once...I simply can't keep splitting time up more and manage to get this done in a decent amount of time. I want (need) to get one ready for submissions and rejections before moving on to something else. That was kind of the reason for the notebook; a place to put ideas so I'd have a back burner to refer to.

But there's an allure to the idea of moving on to the next idea. What if this one tanks? What if this one sucks?! Then I'll have something that could possibly be better ready to go sooner!

And I have no illusions that this first story is great. I really think that it needs some feedback and work. That's part of the reason I'm giving it a once-over, and my wife is giving a second-over to it. A different set of eyes catches things that I don't. And she kind of does this sort of thing for a living since she has an English degree, so I'm confident in her abilities.

I am pulled to try another story and see how it goes. But each time I stop myself. "Get back to what you promised yourself you'd work on," I tell myself. "Fun stuff later. You need to re-read the work you already did."

"But I'm a worse editor than I am a writer!" I whine.

"Doesn't matter. You'll only get better, even if it's just a tiny bit better, if you try it again. Now, EDIT!" says my brain.

I frown, I pout, I procrastinate, but I open the word processor and have at it again.

I'm slowly going through the manuscript. I keep the more fun projects on the back burner, and as ideas come to me I write them down. Occasionally I remind myself that working on a new story is a reward for finishing the editing task at hand first...

Update on Progress; Where Have I Been?

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!

Writing Yourself Into a Corner

My current word count: 103,157, according to OpenOffice.

The topic: writing yourself into a corner. Ever have that happen?

I was aiming for around 100,000 to 110,000 words. That seems to be an approximate target for scifi novels, and while my story doesn't really involve spaceships it does seem to fit that kind of genre.

As you can see I've already blipped over the low end of the target range.

The thing is, I was coming up on what I thought was going to be the final scenes. Then I sat back and thought about how the main character and the antagonist were going to play it out; I discovered that no matter how I sliced it I didn't like the quick and dirty ending I originally sort of pictured.

This is something that probably depends a lot on your style of creating your story, though. I had only the roughest outline in my head of what I wanted to have happen. I don't have it broken down, as some people do, into a rought skeleton on which to hang more details and layer more details until all that needs to be done by the fifth time through is to add some adjectives and voila...done!

I've heard of other writers that will picture how they want the story to end, write that scene, then rewind and work up to that point. Not me!

Nope, I started with a "wouldn't it be cool if..." then started writing. My wife looked at a part of the early first draft and right off the bat said, "This opening is horrible..."

And she was right. I know what I need for an opening paragraph, an opening sentence, and my first draft's opening was truly sucktacular. Why? Because I had an extremely nebulous idea in my head of what I wanted to story out, and I sat down and just started typing until the idea started getting traction and headed the way of something resembling a story. As a result, the opening wanders, and has little to do with grabbing reader attention. The first half of the first chapter was more an exercise in gaining focus and introducing characters.

I think this is called "organic writing".

At this point I'm over my 100,000 mark and realizing that the ending will take a little longer than anticipated.  That's okay! I thought about what I was going to do, I have a tentative idea of what to do for a resolution. And it will be longer than anticipated.

Why? A few reasons.

One, this is a first draft. The ending may not work, the middle may have parts that don't work, and I may have issues with continuity in my first draft that I haven't even caught yet. Apparently there are times where parts of the story make perfect sense to me because I actually wrote the parts that make sense in my head, and not in the document. It happens. That 100,000 word count may quickly drop when I have to hack and slash parts out as well as redo scenes and details. It only takes about four pages of text to disappear to lose 1,000 words (as I recall the rough estimate is 250 words is about a page of text).

Second, I could change things. Like Paula B. left in a comment to the previous message, there could be ten or more rewrites in store. If the ending (or middle or beginning) doesn't work, I may need to rewrite entire chapters. This could dramatically alter my word count in one fell swoop of the delete key, and my word count is largely meaningless at the moment.

Third, page length is a guideline. Now, ignoring the word count entirely is a bad bad idea. No agent or publisher is going to accept an unknown author with a 300,000 word novel just because you think it's "da' bomb", and they probably don't care if you think they don't know what they're doing by passing up your work. But when you get a rough guideline of 100,000 words for a scifi novel and you come in at 120,000...well, they'll either tell you they'll take it on the requirement that you chop out 15,000 or so words, or they'll...probably tell you to chop out some of the words. If it's a good story, if they think it'll sell, they'll buy it if it's close to their guidelines. The important thing is the story. Grab them, entrance them, woo them...if they can't put down your manuscript, chances are you'll sell it to them, even if it is over (or under) size.

I'm not saying my story is the next big thing. I would hope it is, but let's face it...odds are stacked against me. A first story, from an unknown, still learning as he goes along. That's a really long shot. But if I focused entirely on reality then I'd quickly conclude this isn't worth the effort, and quite frankly I want to make a go at trying to be successful at something like this. So I have to focus on the possible positives as well as the likely negatives!

So what do I do now that I've written myself into a corner where my word count is steadily climbing and my ending is getting a little longer than I liked?

I keep writing. I write until there's something resembling a decent ending, then I give it a quick scan to fix up the beginning, alter some details here and there, give it the roughest coat of polish possible. Then I give it to someone else and see how much they recoil and how much effort it takes them to plow through it to the end, if they make it that far. I get feedback. I rework things that aren't working for them. I get this feedback early so I'm not agonizing over details in a chapter that will have to be tossed out completely.

Most importantly I keep going. I wish I could remember where I first heard, "You can't edit a blank page," so I could give proper credit where it's due. It's true. I can't stop and ponder forever what to do with the ending or wait for the perfect ending...I have to keep going, or I'll shelve my project and just never come back to it. So I just keep asking myself what should happen next, then I go with it. I know I could change it later if I have to.

I guess I'm saying that in my naivete there's no such thing as truly writing yourself into a corner. You just keep writing. Ask, "What should happen next given the current circumstances?" and you write it. Then you ask it again. And again. And again. If inspiration strikes later, you'll go back and fix it. But first, get the story down so you'll have something to fix!

What Defines a Work as "Yours"?

Here's a question.

I had entered The Writing Show's Halloween story contest. I had written, over the course of four or five days, a 5,000 word story (okay, it was closer to 6,000 at the time, but it had to be pared down for requirement reasons).

As you can tell from reading blog entries my "first drafts" are entirely in need of editing. After I wrote the story I had help from my wife in cutting sections and seeing what areas she thought could use rewording, rework, or clarification as well as grammar and punctuation alterations.

I had some very cursory feedback from the sponsor of the contest; it sounded like my entry, in her opinion, was decent. The contest goes on until the end of August so there's plenty of time for others to far outshine me but just having someone say that it seemed like a good short story to read was a nice boost to my confidence.

One thought nagged me, though. She never saw what I actually wrote. What she got was probably 95% mine, but the edits? Grammar and punctuation that was corrected? Some impetus to rewrite or cut paragraphs? Those were my wife. My story was cut from near 6,000 words to around 4,800 or so.

Part of me tells my inner voice that it's ridiculous. The story was mine. Plot. Majority of descriptions, theme, etc...I came up with all that in this case. But I still have that nagging thought of, "At what point is the story no longer yours?"

Is there a point where the editing is so different that your original writing is just too different to be really yours, but instead a definite collaboration?

Maybe that's a question for others more experienced in the field of authorship. Right now it's an intellectual curiosity for me. Anyone out there have some ideas?