Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! Guess what? I’ve finished my book again! Yes folks, I completed my proofing read through today. I can’t lie, I changed the odd sentence here and there, and some physical descriptions for clarity. I still have a few notes to clarify, 14 to be specific, (been there before, …
Continue reading Finished Again. The to do list before publication begins.
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 …
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! Okay, so the copy edit is complete. One more hill climbed, another mountain ahead. I have started the read aloud proofing pass, and am 5.5 to 7% of the way through that, depending on criteria chosen. No graphical representation employed. So far I have added and removed equal …
Continue reading Reading aloud to the Demon of Perfectionism
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! Almost there! I am 91.6% or 93.2% of the way through the copy edit, depending on criteria used. Hopefully next weekend it will be done, and on to proofing. This week I discovered I used word in an unusual fashion. I used ‘bulled’ as a verb, to indicate …
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! This week marks the achievement of a blogging milestone for me. This is the 52nd week in a row I have posted a blog on Tuesday. Hooray! Now, blogging isn’t the powerhouse it once was in terms of garnering engagement, especially in my simple words on a page …
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! How many times shall I read thee? Let me count the ways. Again. Minor advice column for writers this week. Lessons learned from my own repeated experience as a fellow traveller in the writing trenches. Copy editing progress continues. Depending on how I measure it I am …
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! Good news bad news this week. The good news is that despite a barrel-load of distractions hitting me, I managed to review sixty pages of copy-edited text this week, well over a fifth of the entire manuscript. The bad news is that is not proofing is it? I …
Continue reading Sifting dust for diamonds on the Long Road.
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! It is very cold here, and I write to delay going out into brittle, shard-like sunlight to shovel my drive. Being stabbed in my wincing eye by too-bright light is infinitely preferable to having to shovel in a storm, however, a brutal necessity I have only had to …
Continue reading The Writing Life: Promises kept, with a tiny caveat
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! I have rewritten one of the penultimate scenes in the book. I know where it starts, and how it ends and re-enters the previous narrative. It serves a lot of good purposes, and includes a great deal I had not fitted in before in my mad rush to …
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! And here we all are, rushing toward a day that passes all too quickly, months of anticipation dissipating in a confetti of bright shards, leaving us bloated and queasy. I love Christmas, by the way, though it was an eternal disappointment to the child I was, never receiving …
Continue reading The Writing Life: Rushing to the next roadblock
Roderick T. Macdonald 