Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! I have a cold. I’m still writing. Four more collage pieces since the last blog. The book is beginning to take shape. Key moments have received their first pass. The act of writing is the act of decision making and consciously or not, plenty of decisions have been …
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! Notes from the week. Fallout Spoilers below in #2. I am back on track, faced my fear and read my manuscript again. I can totally sympathize with the writers of yesteryear who threw away or burned entire books after deciding them to be trash, but I think the …
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! This has been a week either of failure, or of tremendously successful procrastination. I can’t lie, I have done not a thing on the book. I opened the file a few times and glanced at the legend ‘Chapter 1’, but then looked away. Why? Well, last week I …
Continue reading I’ll think of a title later… (The Procrastinator’s Credo)
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! Procrastination and doubt. I have written about doubt before, in a series I think. It was quite a long time ago. I thought I had compartmentalized my doubt: not exactly put it away, but perhaps contained it. I felt confident I had developed the tools and the knowledge …
Hi there folks! I did finally finish my vocalization of The Killer and The Dead today, and many improvements have been made, and a mere thirty two notes to self generated. You know, changes, continuity checks, questions for proofers and beta readers, that kind of thing. I’m still a few steps away from hitting the …
I’ve been gone a while. In this period of absence I’d like to say I’ve been finishing off the edits to The Killer and The Dead. Nope. I’ve been working, dieting (dieting takes a whole lot of my mental energy, it turns out – I really have to focus on not eating, hahaha!), and doing …
Continue reading The Writing Life: The Dusty Road to Copy Edit Completion
It’s been a while since I’ve had the time to crank out a blog of an evening. I completed the line edit in double time, missing deadline by a day, but I’ll take it, and my editor is a forgiving soul, for which I am grateful. The essential truth of why I write fantasy – …
This is definitely a doubt based post. Unofficial doubts part 6, but for the fact that I've accepted what I'm worrying about, and am going to bulldoze on anyway. This is, admittedly, a newer one for me, but a variant I think on what I have been through in the past and led me to …
Continue reading The Writing Life: Facing Uncertainty in Editing
It’s a long road I took to publishing my own book, and being comfortable with calling myself a writer. A longer road than I would advise most other folk to take. But the good thing about taking the scenic route is I’ve made sure by now of what I want, and what I’m prepared to …
That’s a lengthly title. But for me an accurate one. I have not defeated doubt, I have not cast it into the outer darkness to lie impotent and weeping. I have, like the demon in my book, cut it down to a manageable size, and reduced it to fighting me at the page by page …
Roderick T. Macdonald 