Shank's Pony

gday gentle reader

(My last post, "Oh! the pain" was published? or re-published? Friday, I don't know which. When I began this one I found it sitting in the blogosphere in draft. This one has suffered a similar fate. It was drafted late Friday on a long weekend (in South Australia) hence it is only getting edited and published today 3 days later - life gets in the way of my writings - frequently)

I don't care what colour it is, forget the horse I'll walk.  The two most important lessons I learned/learnt (choose your own) from the Voyager submission were

Firstly - the editing method that suits me best is the same as I used to write the damn thing - I need to set a solid achievable deadline and daily/weekly milestones by which I can measure my progress. It's a common business ploy that works for me.

However with this book [book 1 "Break"] the Voyager deadline was too tight. I  was fooling myself that it was ready to publish and all it needed was a tidy up. I was wrong (I often am). During the edit I uncovered highlighted notes throughout the book suggesting  "needs more"  "rework this"  "new scene here" Notes I had forgotten even existed.  

The fact that I did get it done and send it off, is testament to my wife's forbearance. As said in my last post "midnight oil was burnt - rest of life put on hold." 

Secondly - by reading the novel thoroughly (looking for places to tighten it) in a compressed time frame with nothing allowed to distract I got a much better sense of the story as a whole; probably for the first time since writing it.

So two weeks  ago I set a new deadline to finish editing the trilogy on 31st July this year 2013 and divied up the remaining work ( stopped - while I fretted and waited for the voyager result). 

Yesterday I caught up the backlog and went into the black for the first time. Today I stayed there. I'm not fussed by the number per se, I edit to the nearest POV change that keeps it black. 

By  coincidence I am almost half way (49%) through editing book 2 and the whole trilogy at the same time. What continues to alarm me however is the size of each keeps growing. I thought editing meant cutting. (simultaneously I occasionally edit the scenes of book 3 that I want to parse through my writers group - hence a mild increase there)  

The only figure in the seemingly complex tracking sheet I alter at the end of each writing day is   new total   the rest is automatic. The  edited total  for bk2 only gets adjusted when I think about it. On a daily basis it's up and down like a yo-yo.

One day when this trilogy is properly published I will look back and marvel at the Machiavellian machinations I had to use, to convince myself, to get on with it and get it done.

ooroo until my next post
rob

"Oh, the Pain,"

as Dr Smith Lost in Space said frequently. 


gday gentle reader, 

   back in October last year I posted that I had

"205,000 word to edit in 10 days, leaving a couple for the synopsis and query letter. 20,500 a day - midnight oil was burnt - rest of life put on hold. It got done, it got sent. It is not as good as I would have sent if I had continued as I was."

That was Book 1 out there at last, and while I waited I thought to edit Books 2 & 3, just in case. As November and December evaporated I slowed down. Then Xmas got in the way. The editing slowed further as the deadline for a result approached. I watched the site daily for an update and frequently checked my emails.

Such is the nature of Hope 

Last night, while I was sleeping (perchance dreaming of publication) I received their boringly standard polite rejection.

Despite that writers have (or should have) an expectation of rejection, when it comes it is not without a degree of pain, the mild pain of disappointed hopes, as Zachary's expression "Oh, the pain." exemplifies.

Don't get me wrong I really appreciated the fantastic opportunity to submit my manuscript direct to a potential publisher. the result though not as I might wish, is nonetheless enlightening. Their "thorough and fair consideration" means the work needs work. 

I knew that. Its good but it aint yet polished to high gloss.

I posted my result to facebook (as one does these days).

"Yippee I just received my first rejection for 'Break' - 19 to go ...
 

 Now I can get back to editing it properly. (i.e. the trilogy as single unified story.)  write better, edit harder, submit elsewhere. "

One, long-time writing colleague responded and I replied - Here is our exchange of approaches to publishing. 

I'm cynical enough to agree with Jo but I want to try the traditional avenue's first - I'll see how I feel after a few more rejections.








ooroo until my next post  
RoB

A horse of different colour

gday gentle reader 

Taking a quote from my novel, and extending the wriding metaphor of my last post, "First rule of mounted troops, care for your animal or walk."  The animal I had been riding was the trilogy but I got back on a horse of different colour, a new short story, and paid scant attention to the one that had carried me so many miles. At the time the theory seemed sound - to quote from last post - 

It worked until I finished the short story, which then had to edited - oops. I now had two animals needing attention and I was walking, it all became too hard, I fell off - again. 

  And that's about as far as this silly metaphor will stretch without surpassing it elastic limit.

Then Harper Voyager opened their transom for unsolicited manuscripts for 14 days a magnificent opportunity too good to miss.      

 
205,000 word to edit in 10 days, leaving a couple for the synopsis and query letter.  20,500 a day - midnight oil was burnt - rest of life put on hold.

 It got done, it got sent. 

It is not as good as I would have sent if I had continued as I was. I now think however that with out the impetus of Harper/Voyager's deadline it might never have got finished. 

There was so much more I wanted to do. For example the story takes place over a year. I have a chart with every POV characters birthday marked. Another has the daily temperature and rainfall for every day of the year. telling details which never got used. 

Then (of course) as soon as it was sent I found an error on the first page - consecutive snatches of dialogue from the same character and the response from the other character in the scene  (supposed to be between those snatches) was missing. 

   

I now have a new editing philosophy, which works the same for me as the "write book three in a year" did to get the trilogy finished, 
to wit: For book two I've given myself until the end of the year to edit it (overly generous I now think) The total words divided by number of days give me a daily target to edit. Since today's target was reached yesterday I had time to blog about it today  

ooroo until my next post 

Rob

 

Get Back on the Horse

gday gentle readers (a long post)

It took more time that I would have imaged to get back to work. Finishing the first draft of the trilogy did me in. I could not get my head around not have that goal and deadline in front me

As I moaned on facebook, I felt lost. 

A couple of fellow writer's comments were, as I already knew, spot on - the writing equivalent of 'get back on the horse' but as I pointed out that's easier said than done.

I could give a list of extenuating circumstances why I was still on the ground staring up at the beast: It was the end of a 10 year project, Xmas/NY, heat wave, new grandson, pizza bar, hospitalisation etc etc ad nauseum - improper Latin but it works for me - I might even get a sympathy (or pity) vote but my  'extenuating circumstances' would still be bullshit excuses.

Now that I'm back at it, I've figured out why I had the problem  (me personally I mean - each writer will have their own way of dealing with falls)

I need to know the end. 

That's only half of it but let's start with that. My usual approach for short stories is to start as close to the end as possible. But to do that I need to know where it ends. I have discovered that the same approach helped get my fingers on the keyboard.

Lets step back a bit. When I reached that magic moment of finishing the third and final book in the trilogy after 10 plus years at it, the light up ahead was suddenly behind me, there was nothing in front.  The concepts of editing it and writing something new were vague notions in the back of my mind, things that I would do someday when I finished. They weren't real. I was wholly focussed on the finish line, crossing it threw me.

Obviously I needed a new goal, a new end point to aim at, except what I had just finished was only first draft. It needed editing or it would never get submitted - Heinlein's rule 3.

put succinctly: 1 write.    2 finish.    3 submit.    

I plunged into editing - sort of: I made character sheets, birthday calendars, time-lines  and detailed maps. I then put the three books into one file, stripped out the chapter breaks and divided it into scenes. That's when the real edit started, that's when the hurdles appeared, (plot holes posted in The Tyranny of Distances and I cringed that so many scenes/paras/sentences/words written a decade ago were simply not up to scratch. I fell off again.

Why? Well that has to do with the numbers game I played to get finished. The goal for the final book was one year, 180,000 words. (Roughly matching Vol 1 and 2) Simple maths gave me a good measure of progress; 3500 words a week, 500 a day, easy. It worked. I worked. I finished on time on target and I enjoyed the journey as much as the accomplishment.

I wasn't getting the same joy or sense of achievement from the editing. Something was missing.

Under the pressure of my deadline I always had to move on, to add to the story, to invent new characters and situations. I figured the joy of creation was the missing something.

Ergo I started a new story. This also gave me a better sense of progress, my daily word count. (counting edited words is close to a zero sum game.)

But the editing-which-must-be-done was always in the back of my mind and I hadn't started he story with an end. I was writing for the sake creating and feeling guilty that my massive finished trilogy was not being readied to submit. I needed to do both. I needed a goal that was half creating, half editing. 

Half creating equates to 250 words a day.(this blog is more than twice that already) 250 can be done in hour or two leaving the rest of my writing time for the big edit yet 250/day still adds up to 90,000 words a year; 5 hefty short stories or a good sized novel. That prospect excites me.

The tall story above is the result of being thrown and getting back on the horse.

week 1_________Languishing.

week 2___Goals set ~ write.

week 3_____Write some more.

week 4___Back on the horse.

At the same time the editing now progresses - as at right. The orange line is a refinement point, abandoning the fruitless editing word count (except for new scenes). 22,161 is the total of words edited before scenes 26-27. Thus I am now 23,500 words into the edit with roughly 540,000 to go, ie 4% done.  

Tomorrow I'll add my 250 plus words to the current story (which now has a known end) and start editing from scene 28 (of 1300 and something)  It feels good to be wriding again.   

until my next post 

ooroo RoB