A wreath in remembrance of Peterloo, 16 Aug 1819, laid on 16 Aug 2010 beneath the commemorative plaque in Manchester. I saw this while on the Peterloo tour given by Ed Glinert through New Manchester Walks. Heard a lot of good details, some of which matched what I’d read and learned, some that was new [...]
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 of [...]
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 [...]
From my research-pile, a snippet of one of the snarky songs of the late Regency period:
WHEN full sedition’s stalking through the land,
It then behoves each patriotic band
Of Noble Minded Yeomen Cavaliers;
To sally forth and rush upon the mob,
And execute the Magisterial Job
Of cutting off the Ragamuffin’s ears.
HOW valiantly we met that crew
Of infants, men [...]
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 night [...]
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 [...]
I am still very busy, trying to get to 85,000 words by Nov. 30. It will be a squeaker, but I’m really hoping to get to the end of the story (and hoping that it’s around 85k). Last year, I wrote 60,000 words in November, but that got me only 7/8 through the story. I [...]
There’s still lots of time left to win during National Novel Writing Month. One year, when SfN’s annual meeting was in the first week in November, I didn’t even start until Nov. 9, and I still squeaked out a victory!
According to NaNoWriMo’s blog, 2008 posted an all-time-high win rate (18.2 percent of 119,301 registrants [...]
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Posted 05 November 2009
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So, in clearing the decks for National Novel Writing Month, I’m crash-reading NORTH AND SOUTH by Elizabeth Gaskell, and, no surprise, it’s not working. Gaskell’s writing demands a slow read, tasting all her clear phrases and cogent observations. And I know I said this earlier about MARY BARTON, but it reads so darn modern, I [...]