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!

Still Plugging Away

Okay, things have slowed down a bit. Part of it is because I'm going over the manuscript for what seems like the fifth time, even though I know this is actually the third time for me.

I'm working on synopsis notes. According to the "traditional wisdom" (meaning: information I can glean on what you're supposed to do to try getting science fiction published) you write the manuscript, polish it up a bit, then create a synopsis and a query letter then shop it to agents who in turn will try selling it to a publisher. After the couple years pass that this process takes...assuming you find someone willing to take a chance on you...you get an advance check that might cover a dinner at Red Lobster.

I'm working on the synopsis part. Specifically I'm working on the synopsis notes; a long distance friend advised me that I'll want to create several versions of the synopsis with varying lengths. I sat down and thought about it; the best way for me to do this is to create an overall summary of the manuscript, broken down by "chapter," from which to derive synopsis sheets. Once all of that is finished I could write an agent query since the query will require what is essentially the manuscript squeezed into a couple paragraphs (and this is a 390 page manuscript already...how do I squeeze everything down to less than a page!?)

Thankfully the notes are going really fast. I've caught a couple more typos along the way and made quick fixes to them as I see them. Just goes to show that no matter what there will be mistakes that slip by not once, not twice, but three times, with two sets of eyes reviewing it.

I'm also looking at printing a copy of the manuscript for someone who said he'd be a beta reader. I don't know how receptive I'll be to making huge changes unless he finds something really horribly off; then again, if something really doesn't work then I'll have to do what I have to (by the time he's done with it I may already be querying. With any luck.) I got a quote from FedEx Kinko's. Forty bucks. Ouch!

Then again it would be something to just have that manuscript, even in it's rough, possibly never publishable form, in my hands as a physical thing. It would be a way of saying that I accomplished something, that my year of work wasn't a total waste.

I might do this just for that feeling alone. That I accomplished something. I see a therapist for the issues I encounter dealing with life in my post-surgical state (insurance requirement, ironically). He said that just writing a novel length manuscript is quite an achievement that I should be proud of. Part of me wants to believe that. The other part says the proof is in an advance check. Otherwise this was little more than an exercise in trying to write but ending up wasting a year of time.

Much of this is my own confidence issues. I try to keep expectations realistic, and sometimes the pendulum swings a little farther into the "you're wasting your time" side of the equation. That's when the optimistic side reminds me that my end goal...of querying and getting those rejections...is the point I've been aiming for all along, and good or not, anyone can achieve the point of querying and getting rejected. I can do that. I'll just secretly hope that someone eventually doesn't reject it, and in the meantime, once I reach the querying point, this manuscript is getting set aside and I'll start working on the next story idea. And repeat the steps again, hoping this time it will sell.

I'm now on page 354 of 390 in the manuscript and my notes are 16 pages long. Considering that I'm just summarizing each chapter section and my notes are 16 pages so far I am hoping that this is a good sign that I can create a 2- to 5-page synopsis and maybe that one pager isn't quite so left field of realistic. Doing the math shows that so far I'm compressing an average of 22 pages to 1 page, approximately, just doing an off-the-cuff summary? Not too bad.

At this rate I'm hoping to have the notes done tomorrow or Tuesday. I slacked off over the weekend; I would have had it done today if I did what I was supposed to do. Whoops.

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.

A manuscript goal

My new stated goal-I'm approaching a year since I started writing my manuscript. I went back and sifted through old entries on this blog to determine my "start date", and it turns out all I said was that I started it after submitting some contest entries to The Writing Show. I was pretty sure I had started writing the manuscript at the end of August, beginning of September; the vague wording of my blog entry seems to support this. My new goal is to finish my pass of editing the manuscript by the end of August.

If my wife finishes the batch of pages she currently has in her possession and then finishes my final set before September 1st...I can mark September as the time to begin working on my query letter and whatever other material may be needed for querying agents.

I then plan on getting a lot of rejections, feeling sorry for myself, and figuring out what I have to do to tweak the story and see if it can be salvaged to the point of submitting again to other agents until maybe...just maybe...it'll be accepted for representation, then hoping like crazy that it sells and brings in a paycheck.

That's the dream, anyway.

Wish me luck!

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.)

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!

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.

Goals and Writing

My word count stands at 98,896 on the first draft.

I had been hoping to finish my first draft in November, spend December editing and rewriting, and then celebrate the New Year by starting my agent/publisher search and collecting my rejection notices.

Well, I still have a few more bits to go on the first draft. I'm thinking I'm very close to my final scenes as I have them laid out in my head, but I obviously didn't quite make my "Done In November" goal.

This brings me to goals in writing. I'm a little disappointed that I didn't make it, obviously, but I can't let it keep me down. I have, however, been keeping to my previous goal of 500+ words per day. Almost every day I have added over 1,000 words to the first draft. For me, with my schedule, that's very good. There have been only a few days where I have skipped adding to my manuscript, and if you average out my progress I have still managed to keep ahead of my goal by a decent margin.

Writing a book, or attempting to write a book in my case, takes discipline. Wanna-be writers have a huge bag of excuses at their disposal to derail writing that Great American Novel. I have plenty of them; I lack time, I lack talent, and the odds are greatly stacked against new authors trying to break into the market, the effort isn't worth it for the amount of money the vast majority of authors make from months (or years) of toil...

...and it's all true, for the most part. Or at least in some way valid.


So I started setting goals and evaluating how to meet those goals, and admitted that it takes a certain amount of discipline to meet those goals. I cut time out of the TV time to be replaced with "placing my butt in the seat and the hands on the keyboard". I don't have a home office space so I will take a laptop into the bedroom with a lapdesk so I have a slightly quieter space to try focusing a little better on my story.

My most basic goal is to make some advancement on the story each day, be it a 100 words or 1,000 words. I have good days and bad days, but I've had very very few days where I don't add something to the first draft.

I use these goals to keep me motivated through the doubts and fears. I don't have an English degree, I didn't even really like my English classes in school. I don't know if anyone would like my story; they very well might not. I fully acknowledge that this is a first attempt at writing anything more complicated than a long email and as such it will very likely not be anything near what the masters on the shelves at Barnes and Noble have written.

On the other hand, Anne Coulter and Glenn Beck have had books released as well.

So I plug on, focusing on my goals more than my fears. If I never get published, I'll have pride in knowing that I tried, and that I gave it an honest effort in addition to the pride of having made my goals and stuck with them.

If you want to achieve something in life you need to create goals to help measure your progress. If you don't make a milestone, you reassess and move on, continuing to make progress. Only fail yourself by giving up on your goals...so...I've failed to finish the first draft in November. I'm now going to try focusing on finishing it up as soon as I can into December so I can start editing and rewriting, and still at least try to start the query process in January. It's not too late to meet that goal yet...

Mostly Through NaNoWriMo Already...

I've mentioned the National Novel Writing Month, also called NaNoWriMo. Now that we're more than halfway through the month it means that if you're pacing yourself out, you should be over the 25,000 word mark, since by midnight of the last day in November you need 50,000 words to "win".

I am not doing NaNoWriMo because I started working on my own manuscript in September, and currently have a wordcount of 83,604 words; if I stopped to try competing in NaNoWriMo (the manuscript must be started from scratch on November 1st) I'd have lost my momentum for the work I'm trying to finish.

I try to get a little further on my work each day rather than hit a specific word count since I may become discouraged when I miss the count. I was curious, though, how I would have stacked up if I were competing. So I went back through some numbers I had recorded to get an approximate number of words I had added since November first, and I hit a not-to-bad 20,000 words!

Not bad, I think. I'd be only slightly behind if I were competing.

How are other people doing? Even if you're behind, the goal is to make progress. There are no penalties for not making the wordcount. If you're ahead, keep going! If you're lagging, don't give up!

First Novel Update: November 15th: Weekends Are Hard On Progress

First draft word count according to OpenOffice: 80,391. I officially broke the 80,000 word barrier!

Too bad this wasn't a NaNoWriMo novel...

The bad news was that I only managed 909 words today. Yesterday was a bust; I spent an insane amount of time at a really cool book sale in a warehouse (already blogged about it yesterday) and...what else? Oh, yeah, blogging after I got home last night, and spending some time with my son post-shopping while watching his rented Underdog DVD and playing on the Wii and playing with trains and...you get the idea.

So it was a mixed weekend. I don't regret how my Saturday went despite not making progress on the novel. Today I didn't hit my optimistic 1,000 words, but then again my set goal is 500 words a day and I managed to make some headway. Even 100 words is 100 more than was there before.

It seems that my word count tends to go down on weekends. I don't know why exactly other than my routine for the past five days is interrupted and I have less structure on my weekends than the days I slog through my workday.

The important thing is to continue working each day and continue making progress. Tobias Buckell wrote about the issue here on his blog; if you take a significant break on writing a novel, you lose all momentum. You remember less of the events in the story, you lose the workflow, you lose track of things...and you lose the excitement that drives the story forward, and boy oh boy is it a chore to get back into the story when this happens.

In reflection, I was disappointed that I didn't make as much progress as I would have liked to over the weekend, but I am happy that I made some progress. Big or small, progress is the key!

First Novel Update: November 11th: Thoughts About Dialog

My first draft is currently at 75,764 words according to the word count on OpenOffice.

I have been writing quite a bit of dialog in this story (big surprise). Part of the issue with this is that it's not always easy to write "realistic" dialog.

As someone with Asperger's I already notice certain details in people's speech. Primarily because there are certain things...verbal tics, if you will...that drive me NUTS.

I hate people saying "umm" or "uh". Can't stand it, and refuse to listen to public speakers that stammer constantly.

Or people that use taglines in their speech like "or whatever."

Or...well, I could go on. But I won't. Because the point is that dialog written in books isn't like dialog that we use in everyday speech. In real life we clip our words, use filler language, and use words that don't really contribute to the advancement of the plot. Probably because our lives are viewed as having plots while generally a novel is supposed to have a plot.

I'm not going to go back and edit for that quite yet but this is a topic that I have to keep in mind when editing time rolls around. I'll need to review a list like this one from fictionwriting.about.com that gives some helpful hints on how to trim dialog so it's readable and...well, readable.

In general dialog should read as if it were being said by real people in an actual conversation, but at the same time should be trimmed of excess verbiage and filler that doesn't serve to advance the plot or emphasize some aspect of the character.

If you have a character that is supposed to be dumb, then you'll end up doing things like adding pauses and "um" and "y'all"; something that many people do in normal course without being dumb, but when it's emphasized in the written form, you turn it into a characteristic of a personal stereotype despite the fact that these things are quite common in everyday folks. Characters that are supposed to be intelligent sometimes show it through excess or complex verbiage that nearly talks over the heads of the readers (but hopefully not completely over their heads or who would want to read that? Authors do still need audiences, after all...)

It's a complex thing to do, creating that balance between authentic dialog and dialog that isn't so transcribed that the reader has to slog through the words and get bored out of their skulls. I don't know if I have any skill with this because I'm still in the first draft; I'm focusing on just getting a basic story completed before I go back and evaluate the dialog.

Personally the only thing that has stuck out to me is that I think I ask too many questions in the dialog. In my head I really see the characters saying this and as I'm working on it I see these conversations coming out this way. I think maybe...just maybe...I am more into getting information by asking questions and don't know if people really do this in real life as much as I do. The first read (which is to say what I'm hearing in my head as I type) sounds fine.

I won't know until I go back to edit, I suppose. Or I have my first reader come back to me with some feedback on the dialog.

That's my reoccurring fear for now; my dialog is either too contrived or not varied enough to sound realistic. But it's a worry to focus on later. Right now I need to get back to writing.

First Novel Update: November 8th

Ironically it seems that my weekend sees a drop in word count. We took my daughter out college touring yesterday so we spent most of our time on the road; combined yesterday and today, I added 925 words to the first draft of the manuscript.

That brought the total up to 73,102 words as of tonight.


I'm tired and at the moment want to start unwinding before facing the next workday. I need to get to bed and I keep coughing like something is stuck in my throat. Annoying!

I have read more and more material about what it's like to try to transition into a career in writing. It's not a pleasant picture; I'll probably blog more thoughts and discovery as time goes on, and a progress update on the state of the novel isn't the right place to put such things, right?

Anyway...weekend = lower word count, but I still made headway. That's what's important. Butt in seat. Fingers on keyboard. Words on...screen...

Writing My First Novel

This is more appropriately titled "Writing My First Novel's Manuscript". The odds are stacked way way against being published, so while I think my story is okay, it's still a first effort and I have no illusions that it will be the next Harry Potter.

It would be nice, but I really doubt it would happen.

I figured that seeing as this was supposed to be hints and tips and information about writing, I should probably post some updates once in awhile to what I'm working on. My first manuscript is currently listing in OpenOffice as having 68,918 words and no it's not finished.

The story is a current day science fiction story. My goal is to have at least 500 words a day added to the first draft; my typical word count average has been over 1,000 words a day, so I've been happy with that progress. Some days are worse; I've had times where I was so tired I added a couple hundred words and fell asleep. Other days were fantastic. Today, for example, I added 2,599 words so far, and am contemplating hiding in the bedroom with the laptop to see if I could pound out a few more words and get a little further on the story arc.

It will still need heavy editing, of course. And parts will probably benefit from a rewrite. The way I figure it, the hardest part is actually getting the story down so I'd have something to edit.

Hopefully the finished product will be good enough to polish. The only way to tell is to finish it and start editing, right?