I finished The Red Palace (TRP) again today. How many times does a writer finish a book? A lot, in my experience. But I’ve only done this a few times. The attributionless experiment is over, who says what is now clear. More than that, revisions and rewrites have been included, small excisions, small elaborations. I …
Continue reading Finishing again, new tools acquired for next time.
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! I have had a good week. I hope you have had one too. Now, on the eve of returning to work, I wish I had more time off. Isn’t that always the way? Too much time spent looking at the screen upon which I now type. But, I …
Continue reading Imagined History, Anticipated Rewrites, and Optimism
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! 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! 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! Yes, that number has loomed larger. But fear not, many are more like markers than problems, placeholders to remind me where to make consistency fixes, which shall be removed with great joy in large chunks as their time to be resolved arrives. In short, I am making a …
Hello, my friends and the occasional relative! So yes, I have 43 problems to solve in my rewrites. 43 questions or comments left to myself in the text. Some are thankfully minor, a note to self to change a sentence, or even a word. (Yes, one word changes can be a nightmare, just let me …
Roderick T. Macdonald 