Category Archives: Writing

Editing Woes and the Run-Up To NaNoWriMo ’10

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At first I didn’t care about it. It was to be a one-and-done deal.

Then I cared a little more. Two. That’s it.

Now I’m seriously considering a third round of edits to my NaNoWriMo ’09 novel, not because I feel like this book is moving anywhere toward a publishable realm, but because as I’m working my way through writing the second draft (which I expect to grow nearly 50 pages from the first draft), I keep telling myself there are things that I will focus on next time through. I’m finding that, at least for me, focusing on one or two specific trouble areas (showing vs. telling, say) is what I’m going to need to do. I’ve been able to fix some of the show vs. tell problem spots, but certainly not all of them. This round of edits has been about organizing and clarifying. It’s about getting things where I want them to be (and moving things around, which I talked about in a recent post) and then working on more fine-tuning.

My pacing was pretty good. The past few weeks, however, have slowed me down considerably as I’ve had a number of engagements and obligations and other things to keep me abnormally busy. My goal since January has been to have the first/second edits (in my mind they’re different, but to some people they’d be the same) completed by the end of October – ideally well before the end of October – so that I could put it aside and move on to my next NaNo project.

But alas.

Continue reading →

My Novel: A 100,000 Word Jig-Saw Puzzle

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I’m just about halfway through editing the manuscript of the first draft of my novel. I’ve written more extensively about my editing process before, but the long and short of it (for new readers or those who missed it before) is that I printed off the first draft and went through it for months with a pen and wrote myself notes, made corrections, crossed things out, drew arrows, and things of that nature. That was also my first true reading of the novel.

Now I’m taking that manuscript and reading it a second time, only now I’m doing it while writing the second draft. I went back to square one. I’m not editing in the document, I’m straight up re-typing everything. I’m glad I’m doing this because it’s helping me catch errors and I’m seeing where plot lines need to be developed. It’s tiresome at times, but I don’t let myself copy and paste anything from the original document. I don’t even open it up. Sometimes I’ll go through material that I didn’t mark in the manuscript, but as I’m retyping, I’ll think to myself that it still needs work and I’ll end up making changes. This is why I continue to love my editing process (which is good, since I’m the one using it). I’m always “getting it” just a little bit more. And by “it”, I mean that je ne sais quoi that comes with writing, which is so multi-faceted. Continue reading →

Getting My Editing Groove On

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Being that I never really took my writing all that seriously before (at least, not when I was old enough to *actually* take it seriously. Sixth grade doesn’t count), I didn’t really have a method in place for editing. In college, my idea of editing creative writing was to take all the copies of my work that were given back to me in workshops, go through, and make a few changes. I really didn’t put a lot of time and effort into it. I attribute this to many things, and as I’ve mentioned before, a lot of it had to do with losing that spark (on account of being a busy college student and also coming to despise the egomaniac who was teaching the majority of my fiction classes). I never went back through and took a good look at what I’d written because I never cared much about most of it. I only really remember a handful of pieces.

The whole time I was writing my NaNoWriMo novel, I didn’t think about editing. My goal was just to get to 50,000 words. Once I made it there, my goal became to actually finish writing it. I was a little unsure for a while, but when it became clear that I was going to finish writing it, I started thinking about editing. I guess my pattern of decision-making has been kind of linear in that respect. I ended up leading myself right into a process of editing that I hadn’t considered, but it’s working out really well for me. It’s forcing me to not only go back through my work, but to interact with it, as well. Continue reading →

Mission: Editing – Accomplished.

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Maybe it’s part of my process that I take a lengthy hiatus from what I’m doing. I took a pretty long break as I was writing my novel, but after a few months I went back to it. I started off really strong with doing my first round of edits on my first draft…. and then I stopped. It wasn’t as bad as the writing break – I’d still do some editing here and there, but a few weeks ago I finally gave myself a proverbial kick in the pants to get working on it.

It’s fitting, then, that I finished writing my novel at 3 a.m., and last night/this morning, I finished doing the first round of edits at 3 a.m., as well.

Now I’m once again faced with the “What next?” question. I already planned to do another round of edits on this one as I go from the paper copy back to the computer, but then what? Hopefully I’ll be able to get myself to work at a pace that will allow me to be finished in time to participate in NaNoWriMo ’10 this year (or at least in a good place to work on both). But what then? Continue reading →

Meta

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I used to be a writer.

I used to take it pretty seriously, too, and while I’ve never been absolutely phenomenal at it, I’ve always been a decent writer at the very least. My whole life (okay, since I was two or three years old, but before I was even in pre-school) I have wanted to teach. The only other occupation that I even considered was one in writing, and I knew that it couldn’t be my only occupation. In addition to my teaching career, I had big plans to write a novel. But as Phil Collins would say, something happened on the way to Heaven. Continue reading →

Blogging for the New Year

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I’ve had any number of blogs in the past. I’ve had several eBlogs. Those never took. I used the blog feature on MySpace to review books or, on my “school MySpace,” to tell my students about homework assignments. The problem there was that MySpace drove me crazy. It’s so 2006, anyway. So last decade. I’ve had WordPress blogs before, but they too went the way of the caribou. Too personal, too whiney, perhaps. This was most evident in my most faithful blog: LiveJournal. I created that account shortly before leaving for college in 2001 and then rediscovered it my sophomore year. I’m glad that I did because I can go back now and read about a lot of fun memories from college that I’d forgotten about. This also affords me the opportunity to excessively roll my eyes at myself, but what are you gonna do? I quit the old el-jay cold turkey on my 25th birthday. It was the end of an era. I was, after all, a quarter of a century old (or young) by that point.

Since then, no other blogging venture has really stuck for me. By and large, the reason for this is because it’s so easy to vent frustrations, to whine and complain online, and instead of doing anything productive with those blogs, I was merely chronicling a depressing existence with banal details. There was no thought behind my previous blogs. I wasn’t creating or analyzing. I wasn’t thinking. I was documenting. That’s okay for some, but I wanted something more. Thus, Frankasaurus. This is my attempt to start over. I need to get back into writing. Unemployment has made me feel like I’m rotting away from the inside out, and I need to do something to keep my brain from atrophying. Super Mario Bros. on the Wii just isn’t cutting it (it’s surprising how easily that controller slips back into my hand and I remember all the warp zones and extra lives just like fifteen years haven’t even gone by…).

I have no intentions of making this into a “This is what I did today…” kind of blog. I have every intention of using this as an outlet for some of my thoughts and opinions, and possibly for some reviews. I welcome discussion, but I won’t discuss with anyone who is irate and screaming at me. If, by chance, I happen to do something really cool in my personal life (like the time I wrote a book in November), it might get a mention, but it is my hope that those will be details mentioned in passing. If you know me, you know my sense of humor, and I sincerely hope that translates here. I guess we shall see.