Saturday, 20 November 2010
And about time too
Been at Birmingham's Writers' Toolkit conference today, and a not bad time had at all - there's something rather cool (in the nerdy way, of course) about spending a day in the company of a couple of hundred or so authors, playwrights, students, educators, arts administrators and the like. A few useful contacts made, and (perhaps most importantly for these kinds of events) a reminder that there's a community of real people out there, rather than names on screens - and that the community is a) not massive and b) it doesn't exclude you.
Tuesday, 2 November 2010
And back...
Phew. Sometimes weeks off are more tiring then weeks on. No matter. So I've read through what I've got so far and it's OK. Patchy, but there's some promise there. It needs some time to mature, to ferment, to distill though. So I'm going to leave the draft as it it and move onto other things. I also need an ending: my original ending isn't strong enough in the light of what's now coming before it, so I need to think a bit about how to approach that. That may take a little time.
That's not to say that I'll be un-busy in the meantime. I've got the rest of the third draft on the other novel project to finish (I'm almost 2/3 of the way through that and I want to concentrate on that for the time being to get the draft done). This'll then need a read-through and a little thinking time as to how to deal with the manuscript to make it as good as it can be. A fourth draft is likely, be it only a skim over the top (firming dialogue, trimming the more persistent adjectives and adverbs, making sure that the gap between what's on the page and what my head thinks is on the page is as narrow as it can be). And then we'll see what I've got.
So the blog's going to shift in focus, from daily word-count / personal gee-ups, to more of a daily diary on what I've done that day (or over the weekend if it's a Monday). I'll probably also post capsule reviews of books I'm reading too (the idea that reading and writing are separate is, of course, daft) where they support the writing that I'm doing.
I've converted a bunch more stories to .pdf also, and they'll be filtered onto the story page over the next few weeks. There's no sense in having them sat on a hard drive.
That's not to say that I'll be un-busy in the meantime. I've got the rest of the third draft on the other novel project to finish (I'm almost 2/3 of the way through that and I want to concentrate on that for the time being to get the draft done). This'll then need a read-through and a little thinking time as to how to deal with the manuscript to make it as good as it can be. A fourth draft is likely, be it only a skim over the top (firming dialogue, trimming the more persistent adjectives and adverbs, making sure that the gap between what's on the page and what my head thinks is on the page is as narrow as it can be). And then we'll see what I've got.
So the blog's going to shift in focus, from daily word-count / personal gee-ups, to more of a daily diary on what I've done that day (or over the weekend if it's a Monday). I'll probably also post capsule reviews of books I'm reading too (the idea that reading and writing are separate is, of course, daft) where they support the writing that I'm doing.
I've converted a bunch more stories to .pdf also, and they'll be filtered onto the story page over the next few weeks. There's no sense in having them sat on a hard drive.
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