As I noted earlier here, heads down in editing. No idea if my overall word count is up or down at this point. With the first pass on paper, there’s tons that’s crossed out, but lots written in margins too. The stack of pages left to do looks like less than 50, after which I [...]
With the long weekend in the US, I’m diving back into my VP novel for an editing pass. Not to put to fine a point on it, I don’t know what I’m doing. Previous attempts at editing novel-length fiction have typically taken a looong time, and while producing a greatly improved result, haven’t produced something [...]
Why 14 months? Because numbers are arbitrary, and there’s a better beginning, middle, and end this way. The primary drawback of my choice of writing as an avocation is that on top of a sedentary, computer-centric work day of 8-10 hours, I throw on a few more hours of the same. There’s a serious risk [...]
Inspired by fellow VP alumni Miranda Suri, here’s a look behind the scenes at Chez Joel. What I’m working on: Still plowing on my NaNoWriMo 2010 project. I briefly delved into a 6-year-old short story, which holds a special place in my heart as my first rejection-with-comments. For now, I’m focusing on the novel while [...]
Well, I crossed the 50 kiloword mark, and in NaNoWriMo terms, that means success. How this was the same as previous NaNos: I’m thrilled with my results. This is like interval training for writers, and I cranked out lots of words. Many of them crap, but some good stuff buried within. Every time I do [...]
I’m in. My plan is to re-write my 2007 NaNoWriMo-winning novel from the ground up, now that I am so much closer to actually knowing what I’m doing. My goal is 1k words per weekday, and 4k words per weekend-day (with Nov 25 & 26–off from work–counting as weekend days). If that goes completely to [...]
The short piece I wrote at VP is now making the rounds. I ended up making quite a few changes based on some excellent feedback: new title, new POV, new focus, and entirely new first act. I’ve never been good at revision, so I take this as a sign that I might have actually learned [...]
Reviewers for a recent piece I’ve been working on uniformly hated one of my favorite lines, which introduced contemporary everyman-angst with something like Once the prices of beer and oil went into their current trajectory… The comments were that the reference didn’t fit in with the story (all too true), and that it didn’t make [...]
I’m always curious about tools that other writers use, so here’s my contribution to the discussion. MacBook Pro. I switched when writing my non-fiction book, after a particularly nasty system crash that corrupted a bunch of saved data. TextWrangler. Everthing gets written in to txt files, possibly as fine-grained as one-per chapter. I use a [...]