Another Draft is Finished!

I can feel the end of this book coming on. I finished up the new ending this afternoon. There's one whole new chapter plus an epilogue sort of thing. Before those is a chapter that was heavily reworked and a moderately reworked chapter. So . . . those chapters will need a few more passes by themselves to make sure it's fit to be included with the rest of the GIANT.

Furthermore, I have to finish up my hand edit of a few of the earlier chapters and make the digital revisions. Barring any outside life scheduling conflicts, it's about a month's worth of work. After that I'll need to run through the whole thing once for for at least a spelling and typo check and, I hope, at worst a minor here-and-there touch up. It may turn out that it will be a light revision and I'll need a typo check follow up after that. The last thing I want to do is send this thing out and there be a bunch of stupid typos or confusing sentences.

Writing a New Ending

I've had the opportunity to devote a lot of time to writing as of late, and feel that if I don't take the opportunity to do it now, I'll never have it again. So, I've been writing and editing, writing and writing a lot these past few weeks. I think its paying off - the proof of course will be when I try to shop this thing around. Most of what I've been reading lately is good - there's not a lot of cutting and rewriting anymore. I'm not sighing and asking myself why I wrote so much terrible nonsense. Not to say that everything is golden - there are still rough patches here and there.

Today I made it to the end of the draft and started writing a new ending to the novel (the GIANT). I was afraid of this - I know what the ending is - I don't have an outline, but its only a chapter or two. I do have a number of conversations sketched out as well. BUT - for the most part it would have to come out of my head and end up on the screen - the screen that is blank. To counter this end of the line blankness, I pasted in a paragraph that I had cut from the old ending, but wanted to rework into the new ending, so I could fool myself into thinking I was just rolling along with the edit as I've been doing for months now.

Turns out, I didn't have much to fear. The words just poured out of me, which was a relief. It was going so well that ideas for further along in the ending were coming to me, so I wrote them in as well. Not bad.

While I've been working on the computer, I've been hand editing a few chapters from earlier in the book. They are the first three chapters from the NOW section of the novel (see earlier posts if you're confused, but NOW is basically the second half of the book). There are some ROUGH stretches in these chapters. I've discovered a shortcoming in that I have trouble describing places. Description of action comes much easier for me. This is something I'll have to work on.

As soon as I'm finished with this hand edit, I'm going to make the revisions to the digital file. Then I'll go back and edit the as yet not finished new ending. From there I'm going to go through the whole thing again and check for errors - hopefully it won't need much intensive editing. If all goes well its a spell check and I'm off to look for agents and publishers.

Writer's Block

My former understanding of writer's block came from popular media. Writer's block was something like this: a writer sits in front of his typewriter staring at a blank piece of paper, unable to think of the final paragraph that will finish his next great american novel.

Here's what I think it is now. Writer's block is an impasse between the brain and the paper (or screen). I'm editing now, and its going pretty well, but I find patches that I want to rework. Usually these are parts where my intended theme or idea just isn't coming through - there was a problem with the langauge. Ha! Sometimes I find the words to fix it, sometimes I just struggle with the idea still in my head. It's SO frustrating to type a few words, then delete them, type some other words, then yell ARGH and delete those. I get fidgety - if I have music on I'll turn it off, no music on? Well lets hear some tunes - maybe that will help.

Too often I have walked away from the computer and come back later (sometimes its 15 minutes, sometimes a day), but I'm really trying to stop doing that now. This book isn't going to write itself for one, but I'm also not going to get better unless I force myself through the tough patches. I'm too far along with this novel to leave problems to be fixed in later drafts. I don't see too many more drafts before I start shopping this thing around for publishing (thankfully - what a long road its been). So I do my best to sit still and type my way out of all the plot messes and descriptive duds I wrote myself into. The proof, ultimately, will be in the reading - my hope is that when I'm finished most of the next draft will just be picking up typos and switching "there" into "their" and "wonder" into "wander" - wish I would have paid more attention in fourth grade english.

Rough Roads and Smooth Sailing

My slow editing, writing, and rewriting continued, but today I made it over the hump and really slammed out some pages. I know I talk a lot about the number of pages I have left, or the number I get through in a day, but it's not a quantity issue. With the revising, assuming I'm paying attention, when I make it through pages quickly it means what I'd written previously is good. Slow days indicate a lot of problems and necessary slow revisions.

I mentioned in the previous post there are two sections to the book: Before and Now. Before, being roughly present day and Now being the future. The slowness of late has been with the first few chapters of Now. The chapters set up a lot of the background (nuts and bolts sort of stuff) for this future world as well as the beginning of the journey for one of the main characters. Apparently I've struggled mightily with this part. It's getting better now, but I think I'll print those chapters and give them a hand edit.

There's two main characters in the Now section and I've reached the point where both are active in the story and I find the reading and writing much smoother and enjoyable. One of the problems before the second character joins is the lack of dialogue and the amount of information the reader needs to understand what is going on. I want to get into the story quicker, but I need to set up the ground rules first. Previously I had distributed this throughout the novel, but my editor advised me to front load more of it as she was confused in several places. I think with another physical print and on screen edit that section should be pretty tight.