One of the hardest parts about a revision, I find, is simply starting the dang thing. The whole concept is just too daunting. There are so many things to fix, and in my abortive fledgeling novels said fixes are never just a simple one-line tweak but rather involve complicated novel-length rearrangements and convolutions and the […]
This writing caper would be a whole lot easier if my process was linear, and I knew all the character's motivations and plot events and whatnot before writing the book. Instead, here I am, floundering in the shallows of the revisions, and I still don't entirely know what is motivating two of the characters. Two […]
Belated apologies for my silence over the past couple of days. Somehow (it might, I dunno, just maybe, have something to do with the increased connection speed I am currently enjoying) I managed to exceed my internet plan's quota, which means every extra byte is costing ludicrous amounts of money. Oops. You might think that having […]
Oy vey. The start of this novel really is problematic. I would cry "What was I thinking?" except I suspect the answer is that I wasn't thinking. Or rather, I was thinking too much, and not finding the answers I needed, and therefore reduced to feeling my way. I'm hoping that once I sort out […]
My immune system is at war, and it appears to be a protracted siege rather than a single onslaught. I was ill on Friday, fine yesterday, and ill again today. This is not my idea of a rollicking good time, let me tell you that much! While ill today, I managed to watch Peter Jackson's […]
My editor sent back the proofs with a few queries and additional suggested changes, so I spent yesterday slicing and dicing words and chapters. Some I've-lost-count-pages later, it is done and all the chapters are of much less variable proportions. Subconsciously I must have known what I was doing, since I didn't have to chop […]
After much procrastination, both before and during the session, and some 1200 words revised, a particularly muddy section of the second novel of The Binding is now officially fixed. The first draft had Amalia1 being evil, when really she's just impulsive and spiteful, so now all the evil occurs at her brother's instigation. This works […]
The problem with drinking while working is that it can quickly turn into just plain drinking, and from there it's a short stumble to "work? what? yes, of course, definitely pour me another." Er…oops. To keep things language-focussed, I did start a new game of awarding "vocabulary points" to those who used neglected or difficult […]
Sometimes I think my metaphors require more research than the rest of my novels' worldbuilding put together. It can be tricky, in a first draft, to hit a metaphor which is in keeping with the worldbuilding but at the same time not so unwieldy that a modern reader is going to stumble over it. Yesterday […]
In the lose-some department, news from my agent is that one of the UK publishing houses considering Shadow Queen has decided to pass. C'est la vie. In the win-some department, Google Alerts is a dangerous wonderful thing. Today it informed me that Issue #18 of PostScripts Magazine will be released in Spring 20091, and will […]