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Work In Progress
Feb
12
And it’s a fumble!
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So much for three pages. Got one and a half pages written, will try to catch up tomorrow.
(fingers crossed)
Popularity: 57% [?]
Feb
11
A Good Start to the Week
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Let’s just say the weekend was a write-off. No details to be shared. However, I woke up this morning feeling great, and looking forward to working on TMA. It’s going to be a short week for this week, as we’re going to visit my parents. Don’t worry, I’m going to come up with some posts to keep you all reading while I’m gone.
Anyway, that means I have to have Chapter 13 done by Wednesday. If I do at least three pages a day, then I will definitely be done. So, it’s off to work. Wish me luck!
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Feb
8
Don’t.
That’s right; don’t revise while you’re writing your first draft. One of the most important things I’ve learned about writing is that first drafts don’t have to be perfect. Their whole purpose is to get the story out of your head and down onto paper. If you go back and try to revise before you’ve finished the story, you’ll never get the story done because you’ll bog yourself down in getting it “perfect”. Holly Lisle, in her Writing Updates newsletter said “If you’re revising an unfinished novel, you’re putting wallpaper on a house that doesn’t have a roof.” That is so true.
So, what do I do when I find myself realizing I need to revise something, or if I can’t remember something and don’t want to stop the flow of writing? I make a note to myself in the manuscript. For example, while doing either Chapter 10 or 11 of TMA, I introduced a new supporting character and, as I am prone to do, I forgot to write her name, description, and so on and add it to my notes. I have her reappearing in Chapter 13, and I didn’t want to stop and spend time looking through the previous chapters so I put the notation “
Why did I do that? To remind me that I needed to look up her name and put it in when doing the revisions. I used the pointy brackets because they’re not something that gets used often, so if I do a search for an < on the file, it'll take me to a place I need to do some work. Why did I color the text? To make it easy to find when reading over the hard copy. Why green? Because green is encouraging. Green means go. And green isn't red, which is the color editors use. 
I use the same technique if I find myself stuck in a scene. I know what needs to happen, but the words aren't coming. I don't want to spend a lot of time on it, because if I do, I'm not moving forwards with the story. So I type in what's supposed to happen in the scene, put it between the pointy brackets, color it green and then move on.
If there's something I need to remember to do that I just thought of, I make a pointy bracket green note in the text when I think about it. For example, Alex and Jarred are talking about the field of dreams I won't go into what the field of dreams are (and what they are in my book) here, but they're comparing the FoD to the world they live in, which they call the living lands. At one point, I'd called the the waking lands, but changed my mind. When I found myself typing "waking lands", I made a note to myself to go through and make sure I used living lands, not waking lands.
It also helps to put notes into the manuscript like that for when I give out the first draft to my writing group for comments. It lets them know that things aren't finished, and sometimes they even take time to give me some suggestions. I don't think I've said nearly often enough how much I love my writing group.
Okay, to sum everything up, don't revise while you're writing your first draft. Instead, put notes to yourself in the manuscript - or however else you keep track of changes you need/want to make - and keep moving.
And now I turn the floor, so to speak, over to you. How do you deal with writing your first draft and realizing you need to make/want changes?
Popularity: 49% [?]
Feb
7
Snowy Thursday
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We had such awful weather last night. Rain turned to freezing rain turned to hail turned to snow. The freezing rain was so bad that I could see the ice on the trees on the other side of the street - and I’m about 20 feet back from the road. When the bus dropped the kids off from school, the wheels stopped but the bus kept going four or five feet before all forward movement stopped. Donovan told me that on the way home, the bus nearly hit a car because it was sliding on the road. And it took Matt two hours to drive what normally takes him 50 minutes to get home (he made a side trip - normally his commute is about 25 minutes).
On a completely different note, can you picture (or rather, can you imagine hearing) Val Kilmer as the voice of K.I.T.T? (I’m reading through all my rss feeds, and this is one story that popped up this morning.)
For those of you who follow my blog on a regular basis, you’ll have noticed a slight change. Previously, I’d had things set up to allow for up to five posts being shown on the front page. I’ve changed it to just one post, and here’s the reason why. Sometimes I write really long blog entries, kind of like this one. When I do a couple of them, the front page just gets so long it gives me the creeps. I decided that it’d be easier on my readers if I limited things to a single entry per page.
There’s also a slightly more mundane and business-like reason to this. I use Google Analytics to learn about who’s going to what pages and reading what. By seeing what posts are being read more often, I can get an idea of the kinds of things you want to learn more about or are just generally interested in. One post per page lets me narrow things down more easily.
On the WIP front, I was actually eager to open up the file and start working on Chapter 13. No, I don’t suffer from triskaidekaphobia, but it’s been a challenge to get going. I ended Chapter 12 at the end of a scene, and while I knew where the story had to go next, I didn’t know how to get it there. As usually happens, I tossed aside the perfectionism that gets in the way and started writing. I can always go back and change it when I’m doing the revisions.
Once I’ve gotten at least half of Chapter 13 done, I’m going to take a step back and do something I should have done before this point. TMA is a cross-genre novel - urban fantasy and mystery/thriller. As such, the timing of things is very important. Can you guess what it is I didn’t do?
That’s right - I didn’t figure out the timeline of events. So, that’s what I’m going to do. As I’m typing this, I’m doing a completely fresh print out of the novel. All 123 pages of it. That’s an average of 268.36 words per page, if you’re into that sort of thing. I’m going to go through the manuscript so far, making a note of the events that happen and when I’ve assigned a date to them. For most events, it’s along the lines of “in three days” or “on Wednesday”, but I still need to keep track of things. If I’m on Wednesday and write “in two days” then what’s happening in two days will be happening on a Friday. It’s really just a little thing to keep track of, but it’s important to maintain consistency and the flow of the story. Nothing throws a reader (or an editor) more than something happening on a Saturday that should have happened on a Monday.
Heh. See what I mean about overly long posts?
Popularity: 54% [?]
Feb
6
Nothing’s Happening
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It’s been one of those days so far. I need and want to work today, but I just can’t bring myself to. It’s grey and gloomy out, with freezing rain and a couple inches of snow on the way. Waking up at five this morning, choking on stuff I’d just coughed up is definitely part of why I feel so dismal.
Hopefully this mood will clear and I can get some work done.
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