Oh, yeah . . .

I just spent two hours with my manuscript and a pink pen, marking inconsistencies and designating entire scenes for the writerly equivalent of the cutting room floor.

It felt great.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Endings

So I added back an additional scene that I'd lopped off and grafted it to the ending. I'm still not 100% sure about it. But it seems to work better than where I'd originally left off and it was nice to retrieve some of those clever lines that I'd tossed away. (Thank goodness for saved drafts.) And now I'm already pondering ways to rewrite the returned lines into something a little more plausible than what I'd put down in the flurry of NaNo. I think I'll go do that now.
Read more

Greetings from Orbital . . .

So I'm here at Orbital 2008 , which is this year's Eastercon. The Eastercon is apparently a long-running thing in the UK--it's a science fiction convention of a more literary bent, a bit like WorldCon, only not quite as enormous. It's held on Easter weekend, because that tends to be a slow weekend in the hotel industry, so it's easier to find a place to hold it for a reasonable rate. (Interestingly, there's a convention in Atlanta called Frolicon that likewise is held Easter weekend for much the same reason. A rather, um, different kind of convention, though.) I am here because one of the guests is a writer named Tanith Lee. There's also a writer named Neil Gaiman in attendance, and it's been groovy to see him, but I honestly wouldn't have come if it had just been him, since he actually shows up in America more often than not. Tanith Lee hasn't been to America in some time, so if I wanted to see her, the mountain had to come to Mohammed. My...
Read more

Ebookishness

Two and half years ago I wrote a blog post called The Wrong End which asserted that self-publishing was less than ideal for the aspiring writer. Obviously the landscape of publishing has shifted in the intervening time. Now that there are more ways to publish and distribute books in electronic formats than there were in 2008, one can set up shop as a self-publisher and not be saddled with boxes of books to lug around and wave in people's faces and you can have large corporations like Amazon and Apple do the heavy lifting of making your work available to the world. This doesn't mean I entirely rescind what I said previously about the hard work from the wrong end. The ease of distribution still doesn't mean that the hard work of polishing the work to be the best it can should be ignored. Even having the wonders of social media to tell the world about your book won't help much if the book isn't that good to begin with. But I am curious about the possibilities of eb...
Read more