It's Going to Be a Long Fall (Season)

  It's going to be a busy fall season! If you hadn't realized, it's already the second week of October, which means National Novel Writing Month is coming up in about 3 weeks.

    I am wrapping up one novel--with the goal to finish it before November 1, planning for my NaNo novel, also due November 1, preparing to edit a story I wrote a couple years ago--something I'd like to finish by the end of 2012, as well as continuing marketing for my recently published book through social media, guest blogs, review requests, etc.
    This marketing process will be ongoing until either A) it does so well I don't need to spend as much time telling people about it, B) it starts getting such bad reviews that I won't be able to recover, C) my next book is ready to release and I will have to devote more time and effort to promoting that one.
    And all of that is just the stuff on my "book/writing" to-do list! This is on top of my marketing work for my friend's website that I've been doing, as well as searching for a new job.

    However, I have an ace up my sleeve this year: I recently bought (with my awesome NaNo winner discount) the software program Scrivener. If you haven't heard of it, it is a writing software that can help you organize and lay out writing projects more easily. It features outlining, pinboards, keyword assignment, and too many other things to name. I've started using it with my current book, and I can't tell you how much easier it's been for me to figure out what I need to do next, which sections need to be added to, where previous characters appeared, and refer back to my outlines, character descriptions, maps, and other planning documents.

    Granted, I had to spend some time getting all those things in order first--uploading files and separating them out, adding the keywords,  etc., but since then, it's been so much easier to go back and work on chapters that need additional scenes or find any anachronisms in my timeline.
    Once I get to the editing process, I think this program will be even more helpful, rearranging scenes, matching up subplots, organizing the timeline, and catching any plot mistakes.
    Last year, I did a post on why you should do NaNoWriMo (make sure to read the comments!). This year, I'm going to go over how to do NaNo when you have a schedule as busy as mine or busier. You know what my schedule looks like for the remainder of the year--this is all on the schedule regardless of whether I get a part or full time job in the meantime. Check back tomorrow for the follow-up, "How to Do NaNoWriMo Next Month."

Ain't no rest for the wicked.

It's A Keeper

  I am currently in the process of revising my novel (different from editing, as you should know based on this post), and it's a little rough. The novel looks great. But as I go through it line by line, sentence by sentence, word by word at times, I look at it and go WTF was I thinking? Why did I use this word or have this character say that? What purpose does this nonsense serve? But if I stand back, and look at the whole paragraph, the whole page, or the whole chapter, I say, wow, I wrote that, look how well it turned out!
    Revision is painful because you have to tear out beautiful phrases or funny bits of dialogue because they don't move the story along in some way or another. It's painful because you have to let that internal editor out--the one you tied up and locked in a closet while you were writing--and let him stand there and mark up your beautiful prose with ugly red ink, with that sniveling, condescending look on his face while he does it. And at the end, you're left with pages and pages covered in red marks like they got in a fight with a tiger and lost. That internal editor is one mean bastard. But, in the end, your writing is more cohesive, more interesting, and more of what it should be.
    I finished editing it last week--fixed all the typos I found, corrected a few formatting and syntactical errors, and set out to print it out again to revise. Unfortunately, my printer is dangerously low on ink at the moment, so I think it's amazing I've managed to print out over 130 pages twice without any black ink.
    Printing job 1: navy blue ink.
    Printing job 2: maroon ink.
Amazingly enough, I succeeded. I didn't even run out of red ink by the time it was done! The only issue is editing in red ink on a print-out made in red ink. The shades are just different enough to tell, but I'm having to be much more careful as I read through the print-out to make changes to my digital document so I don't miss anything.
    What makes this process all the more difficult is that my head has been bothering me lately after using the computer all day at work. I have been having a hard time looking at screens again when I get home, which makes things a little challenging. I can work on the print-out copy ok, but when I have to go back to the computer to add those fixes to the digital version, I have to take a break every few minutes so I don't get a headache.
    I have glasses, but it's not a matter of seeing and not seeing the screen. I think it's just the extended amount of time using the computer has caught up with me and I need more rest in between usage. In any case, I have a few solutions yet to try to fix that problem, so we'll see whether I can overcome it or not.
    I will be hammering through the rest of the novel revisions over the next couple weeks, I hope, but after that, I think I should have a little more time on my hands to blog. Unless lightning strikes again and I get another idea to start writing. But I won't be under a 30 day deadline this time, so I should theoretically still have more time for other things.

Right. Write. Rite. Revision: The rite of writing right. Or something like that.

Does anybody have any revision tips, comments, or gripes?
Share in the comments!

Oh, The Weather Outside Is Delightful

  Hello Dear Readers! I had to take a bit of a break for a while, and if you are wondering why you couldn't get in to read Insistent and Persistent the past couple weeks, I temporarily changed my privacy settings due to a breach. (Post coming soon: 10 Reasons Not To Friend Your Mother On Facebook--just kidding. But seriously, don't do that. Even if you get along well with your mother.)
    Without further ado, this is why I opened the blog back up and wanted to write today: I've been dreaming of a white Christmas since about July, and in Colorado, we rarely get a real white Christmas. "Real" being defined as snowing on the day or the day before, preferably overnight. This year, once again, it looks like I will be robbed of that dream once again, but on the plus side, IT'S SNOWING!! I wasn't sure if it was actually going to happen--but almost the minute the winter storm watch went into effect up here, it started snowing on my drive home from work.
    Funnily enough, it smelled like rain rather than snow, but there was also a smell of static electricity in the air. I never listen to the weather people when it comes to precipitation in Colorado--they have a nasty tendency to disappoint in terms of accumulation. But sometimes, they underestimate the storm and it dumps a few inches more than expected. As much as I hate scraping car windows and driving near so many crazy people (most of whom are from out of state and have never driven in snow before or just suck at it), I still love the snow.
    My cat (affectionately known as "the furball" received his Christmas present in the mail today--a catnip toy squirrel--another furball. He doesn't love it as much as I'd hoped, but he does like it, so that's good. (I'm hoping this might give him something to do during the day so he will consider leaving the furniture alone.)
    I got most of my shopping done online this year, for the first time. It is quite convenient. And I expect to still have money left over from what I budgeted, which means I may buy myself a rather sizable Christmas present... Or early birthday present. Or early anniversary present. Whatever. It seems like everyone is being a little lean this Christmas, compared with last year, but I think I've spent more than ever.
    I also get to go up skiing this weekend--hopefully this time I will not fall on my face again. Hoping to make great strides in my ski skills so that I won't have to stay on the Bunny Hill for the rest of the season.
    Aside from my blog, I have been getting the opportunity to write for real at work (real this time means I am actually credited!). I cannot tell you how positively tickled I am to be able to do that. I am probably spending way more time on it than i should be, but it's important to me. I want the stuff I'm writing to be good, worthy, sort of. All the other writers on the site are professional writers or journalists and have been for several years, so I feel like I need to write well enough so that I seem like I belong among that group. If you know me, you can find that stuff on Facebook. If you don't, you'll just have to wait until I decide to use my real name around here.
    Remember how I once said bad things happen in threes? I had one of those this past week. My brother got some bad news which meant I got some bad news; I got my FIRST EVER speeding ticket which I am still super-pissed about; and one of my co-workers was let go earlier this week. That one hit hardest. We're a small company, and whenever something like that happens, it affects everyone because we're all pretty close. I think what bothered me most about it was that it happened one week before Christmas.
    Not to put a damper on the holiday spirit, I discovered a new cocktail: gin and ginger ale. I received an excellent bottle of gin from a local craft distillery a couple weeks ago, and I was amazed at how clearly I could still taste the flavors through the ginger ale.
    I am also currently editing my novel that I abandoned the blog for during November. I made all the edits by hand, so now I am transferring all those changes to the document on my computer. Next step will be to revise it. What's the difference, you say? Editing: typos, spelling, grammar, syntax, vocabulary--the nuts and bolts of the writing. Revision: rewriting scenes, adding scenes, deleting scenes, removing or adding characters, etc--the heart of the story. I'm hoping not to do too much revision, because I think after going through it once now, it actually turned out quite well. But, we'll what happens when I really look at it with that in mind.
    Sorry for being out of the loop. I just had to recover a bit from my privacy scare before I was ready to come back here and start sharing again. I welcome you back, and I hope I didn't scare everyone away by changing the security settings for a couple weeks.

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas...

When Writing Gets Ugly

  Everyone has had a moment where they looked back over something they wrote and went, what the hell was that supposed to be? Sometimes it was just gibberish; other times you just ended up with a completely ungrammatical sentence; and still other times, you managed to mangle a word so badly with your 120 WPM skills that the auto-correct didn't even know what to do with it. I do that last one frequently due to the dyslexia my brain seems to pick up when it's trying to get something written in a hurry. Except my WPM is far from 120.
    But ugly writing, though it may seem useless and frustrating, considering you have to go back and fix it later, is not a bad thing. It's a start, and for those who write compulsively or regularly (and not compulsively), a start composed of crappy writing is WAY better than a blank page/screen. But that ugly writing isn't going to get pretty on its own, and revision, for some writers, is almost a dirty word.

"What? I didn't write it perfect the first time? 

You've got to be kidding. 

That is 100% quality prose right there." 

    Once we put our egos in check, however, there's a rare occasion when everything comes out brilliant and with no revision necessary the first time around. So while I love editing, I love it only as long as it's not my writing. I am pretty good at giving constructive criticism on other people's work. But when it comes to my own writing, I procrastinate to an obscene amount. If it's shorter, like an essay or a poem, or a blog post, I can do it because I know it will be quick and relatively painless. Every blog post is at least a second draft. And every 2 or more page paper I've written in the past eight years has been a 2nd, 3rd, or 4th draft.
    But the truth is, it can always be better. The question we must ask ourselves is: how much time do we want to/are we able to commit to making it better? To this end, I'm currently enacting a new strategy in my creative writing project, though I didn't set out to do things this way. I wrote--a good 2500 words or so in a day--and then steadily tacked on a few hundred words a day until I got blocked. I suddenly found myself writing the story into a corner (forgive the mixed metaphor) and I stopped. I thought about where I had gone wrong and made notes about where to fix it. And then I did. It took me about two weeks, off and on, to do the rewrites and the make the changes, but I think it's improved. And it's put me back on track. On a track I didn't realize I was going on, but a forward moving track that is not headed for a corner, or dead end.
    Revising 3500 hundred words or so is a lot easier than writing upwards of 30 or 40 thousand words first and then trying to go back and revise all of it. It's a lot of ground to cover, so much ground that it seems impossible not only to try to reread all of it, but to do more than fix a couple commas here and there.
    So, whenever writer's block sets in, going back and revising (and revisiting) what you've written can get your brain unblocked. It may not be pretty, looking at how far off topic you've gone or how ridiculous that string of dialogue sounds (people don't talk like that, do they?), but it helps. It is one day, or one set of however many pages/words you typically write in a day, at a time. Get through it and you can move on in a direction that may be even better than the one you originally had in mind.

Even the ugly duckling turned into a swan.