Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! What a pithy title, no? No. But it is a useful reduction of my recent activity, aside from decorating trees. I am now 64.7% of the way through the text of this ‘final’ editing pass. 67.8% by a different criterion. No graphic representation, as is my wont. I …
Continue reading Percentages return with find and replace minus one as their companion
Hello my friends and the occasional relative! Today is a mea culpa kind of day. I’ve done some more tinkering, but have not significantly advanced in my last pass over the new novel. I’m stuck at the reworking of a conversation: I thought I had a correct angle for the insertion of needed extras, but …
Continue reading The Writing Life: Acknowledging the slowdown
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! I had a conversation this weekend. It happens. In it I explained the boring drudgery of repeatedly going through a book you have written, making changes each time, and then going through it again to make sure that the changes are consistent with the existing text, and where …
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! A new opening has been written and integrated into the manuscript in progress. Callooh and callay and all that. No seriously. I am genuinely frabjous about it. I mean it didn’t grow unwieldy, it seems pretty elegant in terms of adding depth to character interactions and will help …
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! Late on a Tuesday I post this, my weekly update. I keep the streak going! Once again I cannot lie to you, my friends, it is because it has taken until this day for me to finally break through my own resistance to rewriting the opening. Sometimes the …
Hello my friends and the occasional relative! I come to you somewhat shame-facedly, on account of my total failure to engage in the real work facing me: rewriting the opening of the novel. I have nibbled at, then chewed on the bones of all the other available listed problems, and any that remain can all …
Hello my friends and the occasional relative! Not the most inspiring title, eh? Fear not. While I freely admit to having failed to make the huge strides toward the completion of rewrites I would have wanted, there has been progress, and it is good. The problem is that there are some large scale projects left, …
Continue reading 44 problems, or nibbling away at progress, or forest management, you decide!
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative. No exclamation point this week, because I am in the middle of it. This is the hard work. Getting down from 855 to 53 was easy. And 53 to zero would be fine if 10-15 of the 53 did not have to be solved by rewriting the opening. …
Continue reading 53 problems and managing the cascade of consequences
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! I’ve talked about world building before. And today I’m going to talk about it again, because I’m trying to get a solid outline of my next book drafted before my deadline for receiving feedback on The Slaves and The Djinn. (August 12th, btw.) Now I intend eventually to …
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! So in my hiatus from frenzied deadline achievement I have finished the short story I started last week, though it needs to be polished. It is funny, but with a short story you do get a sense of how much you can alter the story by the sheen …
Roderick T. Macdonald 