Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! It was just a couple of things, honest. I have opened the door to editing hell. I was just checking where the eyes were, none glued to anything inappropriate in the text, as can sometimes happen. I checked because I was reminded of Don McNair’s book on Editor-proofing …
Tag: Publishing
Finished Again. The to do list before publication begins.
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, …
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The Writing Life: I got the re-read blues
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 …
The Writing Life: Everything Requires Research
The title pretty much says it all, folks. When I’m writing, I’m constantly needing to research things: medieval clothing, swords of various eras, ships, rigging, rope names, sewer system management, tidal estuaries, mercantile societies and the role of guilds within said societies, pre-industrial food staples in different parts of the world, the burial rites of …
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The Writing Life: Doubts Part 1: Am I Good Enough?
Last week I talked about dissatisfaction, and in the process mentioned its big brother, doubt. Doubt manifests for writers in quite a few subtle guises, so I’m going to dedicate a column a week for a while (with potential interruptions to allow folk to recover!) looking at how doubt can sneak into a writer’s life. …
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The Writing Life: Commodity Versus Art, the Eternal Challenge.
Ursula K. Le Guin died this week. I read The Earthsea Trilogy (as was) a few times in my youth, and loved it. I really should get around to reading the complete Earthsea fictions, and of course many of her other works often referenced in this week of obituaries and commentaries mourning her passing. In …
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The Writing Life: Maintaining Focus, New Goals
It has been over a month since The Thief and The Demon’s release. A month to reflect on how much work has been done, and realize how much more remains to be done. There is a lot to learn and to do online, social media can be an absorbing maze with a lot of new …
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The Writing Life: Letting Go of Your First Love
The first love you wrote, I mean. Of course, many authors successfully publish their first loves, and do astoundingly well. For others there is another story, of a first, or first and second and more novels written and discarded, before a book is released to the reading world. I’m guessing that one of those discarded …
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The Writing Life: Being True to Your Instincts
As I’ve said in other articles, I’ve known forever that I would be a writer, and that I would write fantasy stories. Apart from one cathartic journey into writing nursing fiction, which still had elements of the fantastical (how many nurses find themselves talking to the devil and questioning their own sanity?), all of my …
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The Writing Life: It Takes a Team
I tried for years to transform my writing from manuscript to novel on my own, and for years it did not work. Eventually, I recognized that I needed a team. Only through accepting this, that I was not equipped to do it alone, did I finally flourish…and I intend to do a whole lot more …
Roderick T. Macdonald 