Look! Second-draft is done! No pages remain on the bottom shelf, no scene notecards above them. All pages on the top — done, done, done! I used up all the 500 loose-leaf notebook pages in my pack, so had to switch to the yellow pad for the last two scenes. Structure is solid, promises are [...]
So yeah, it’s taking longer than I thought, but this story is even better than I thought, so there. I’ll be running silent, running deep until vacation in a couple weeks. I really want to be done with this pass and take a complete break, but as the parents say, “we’ll see.” On scene 50 [...]
So, I’ll be running silent, running deep for a bit (like, 4-5 weeks) as I plow through the big second-draft revise. This pass includes the massive plot revise, character sharpening and combining, story rearranging, scene setting, and fluff cutting. I’m finding this nearly as hard as the scene-for-scene cards I did in April, and for [...]
So, after a sluggish start and some mild howling about the first draft of my Manchester story, I managed to build a weekend’s-full of space to get down to reorganizing and shaping this behemoth. This is the revised sentence-for-scene outline, all 15.5 pages of it. It took me 17 hours over two days and the [...]
So, book club started the year with FIFTH BUSINESS, by Robertson Davies, this first of his Deptford trilogy. I read it in two days, enjoying the flawed narrator and the epistolary structure. This reads like a mature writer’s work, with hard-edged wisdom amid the old-fashioned storytelling. But I have never thought that traits that are [...]
Nicola Cornick’s latest historical fiction novel, Unmasked, is available as an “enriched edition” e-book at eharlequin.com. Harlequin promo: Have you ever read something in a novel and wished you could see a picture, find a definition, or learn more about it without having to look it up? Now you can! This special electronic book is [...]
In the past six weeks, I’ve blown through more than 20 of the Richard Sharpe books by Bernard Cornwell (holding off on the 1820-set one to use as incentive to meet my page goals this month). Wow. Rollicking adventure, tight serial plotting and continuing characters who grow (somewhat). I read them in historical order, marveling [...]
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November is National Novel Writing Month! More at nanowrimo.org
