January 2010
9 posts
Inspiration Cupcakes
Even small victories (perhaps especially small victories) must be counted, too.
To say that my prologue is an absolute nightmare is so mild that it borders on inaccurate. These first ten to fifteen pages have been the biggest struggle for me over the last two years. I’ve gone back and forth on what they should contain, and in the same session have been told that they’re both the...
Saturday night (now Sunday morning, I suppose), hopped up on antibiotics and cough syrup that has to have 109 percent alcohol content, I’m making some of the biggest changes in a few of my most significant chapters since they were written nearly seven or eight months ago.
Let’s see if I’m going to be grateful for the “revert to previous draft” function come morning.
Cause a Scene
I feel unspeakably dirty, but I know that at this stage in my revision process, my life would be worlds easier with an eBook reader. The hour and a half I spend back and forth on the F train each day has turned subway cars into my office. Right now, as I’m pouring over each page of my book trying to inventory the lies my main character has told, I’d love to have a portable .pdf...
How does one find the balance between taking time from writing to live life, and taking time from living life to write about it?
Curious Formulas
In his blog post today, agent Nathan Brandsford mentioned that he’s been inundated with a record number of queries lately. One of the things to which he’s attributed the volume is NaNoWriMo novels that “have been edited and are now ready for submission.” I had to take a massive pause.
Early March will mark a year since I finished the first draft of this book. Entering...
Express Oracle
“A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better. An American who read just one book...
Nothing screams “first draft” more than seeing your handwritten edits turn the page into a scribbled mess. Nothing screams “failed rewrite” more than a gigantic “WHY GOD WHY WON’T YOU WRITE YOURSELF I HATE YOU” scrawled across the page in that very same handwriting. In that case, “scribbled mess” would be polite.
As important as words are, maybe the things that defy words, echo in universal language are the ones to which we should pay the most attention.