writing

I’m still chugging through revisions. It took long to get through part 1, but now I’m up to my three chapters a day goal, and am half a chapter away from finishing part 2. If I keep up the current pace, I'll be done in a week and a half.

My wife forwarded me some photos today of a volcano that erupted here in Ecuador a few weeks ago. Tungurahua is a few hours south of Quito and was dormant for a long time before it started erupting again ten years ago. Here’s a photo of the recent show.

I finally finished my second draft yesterday. Well, it could be labeled draft three or four, but I’ve decided all drafts prior to 2005 were drafts .0x. This draft mostly dealt with plugging plot holes, backfilling character changes, and smoothing out the prose. I’m really happy with how the story and characters build and develop now.

I had intended to cut more words during this pass, but while I cut about 15k words, I also added 9k words in new material. So, the current draft is sitting firmly at 192k. Still way too long for a first timer.

It’s no secret that my stories are heavily influenced by my experiences traveling. I spent six months between high school and college backpacking around Europe and living in northern Italy. I also spent my junior year in Finland and am now living in Ecuador. All have helped shape elements in my books to one degree or another.

I know the blog has been more silent than usual this last month or so. I've been doing a lot of traveling. Two weeks back in the States was just enough time to get a houseful of stuff loaded onto a truck, drive it all back East, unload it, paint the storage shed, do some shopping, and then fly back to Ecuador.

After two weeks home, I'm off again on Thursday, but this time to London. My wife has two weeks of training there, so I'm going along to, um, carry her bags. :)

I feel like my revisions have been an exercise in two steps forward and one step back. Especially in the area of word count. My goal was to shave about 35,000 words off this manuscript to get it down to a more realistic publishable length.

I've also realized that I needed a few chapters inserted to improve the pacing. Some I've known were needed for a long time and some became apparent during the re-read. The good news is I'm really pleased with my new chapters/sections. The bad news is they're eating away at my word cut progress!

I’m hip deep in editing/revising part three and I found a new challenge: story flow.

To paraphrase Frank Herbert (bastardize really), the story must flow.

No, I haven’t just discovered that magical pace where the story clips along (or doesn’t), but this is the first time the Point of View characters are not all in the same place.

I’m at the stage of my revision where I hate my book. No, that’s not true. I hated it months ago. But then I read a part that makes me smile or a section that I had forgotten, and all the banging my head on my keyboard is suddenly worth it.

In my daily quest to procrastinate from picking apart yet another scene to find places to cut, I got caught up reading Patrick Rothfuss’ blog.

His post last fall titled Everyone Hates Their Job Sometimes really hit home with me today.

Now, if I could only make this a paying gig, I could call this an actual job…

I may have blogged about this in the past, but as I’m poring over comments I’ve gathered from my critique over the years, I’m reminded how crucial a good critique group is to making a novel a success.

What is a good critique group?

Let me first describe what I consider a poor critique group: a gathering of people who want to write but are more interested in building themselves up than helping the others. Even one selfish member can poison the entire group.

Since being laid off last month, I've made some good progress on editing/rewriting my manuscript. Except for the end of the first act, which I've had to overhaul. It's still kicking me in the rear, though I think I'm close now.

Even so, I find that I'm very easily distracted these days. I'll spend hours looking at Monster.com and other such sites. Then I'll tinker with the graphics for my website, which is getting a little overhaul soon (mostly back end, but the look is going to be tweaked). Occasionally, this sin called Lord of the Rings Online beckons. Then I remember what I'm supposed to be doing since I don't have a "real" (ie paying) job.: Finishing Echoes of Truth so I can start working on The Condottiere.

What's my distraction today?

Has it really been a month since I finished the first draft?

I’ve made good progress on my revisions, but not as much as I had hoped (the real story of my writing life, it seems.). I’ve imputed edits for eleven chapters and finished my complete rewrite of chapter one. The first two chapters got scrapped and redone from scratch with new scenes to better introduce the characters and plot. Chapter two is still coming along. It’s too much explanation of the plan right now. I need to add more conflict.