Lessons is a lot like Lawrence Block’s Telling Lies for Fun & Profit. Both cover a bunch of the big areas quickly like plot and structure, and also include the author’s personal perspective on his career (Morrell’s best known for First Blood, on which the first Rambo was based) and the writing business. It does not focus heavily on sentences or editing. There were a number of interesting insights, and some interesting tidbits on the trials and tribulations of going Hollywood.
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Round 4: 96 of 100 tickets! |
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Today I reached a milestone and finished the first draft of my second novel, tentatively titled Untimed. Now this doesn’t really mean it’s done, revision is usually more work than the first draft. Still, it’s a book. It has a…
As a writer, feedback can be essential to the process. You don’t necessarily want to spend months writing the whole novel draft to find out the voice sucks, or that your plot is boring. I’m a frantic high energy writer (I…
My freelance editor, the awesome Renni Browne, has officially declared my novel, The Darkening Dream, done, and ready for agents! Now bear in mind that “done” is a highly subjective term, and that as soon as anyone gives me an…
The first thing I did after getting my line editing back over the weekend was work on the ending of my novel. Beginnings and endings are so important, and as is probably typical, I’ve changed them a lot. The ending…
The last batch of line edits for my novel The Darkening Dream are in from my awesome freelance editors. Now I just have to spend the next day or two groveling over them, tweaking, and then… Read the entire thing…
For my first novel, The Darkening Dream, I started in word and then switched to Scrivener about 60% of the way through the first draft. I’ve never looked back. Scrivener is a specialty word processor designed for those who write…
As the process of the revising my — hopefully — almost finished novel, The Darkening Dream, draws out the amount of work I have to personally do on it declines toward the limit of… well very little. More and more…
Since I’m always cryptically referring to my novel in progress, I figured I’d post a few words about it. The Darkening Dream is a historial dark fantasy. It’s currently 95,000 words and I’ve just finishing up the line editing and polish. [ Updated…
Line editing and polish is an interesting part of the process of professional writing. It bears a lot of similarities to optimizing code as a programmer, but more fun. One of the weird things is that no mater how many…
The good news is that the comments from my Nov 13 draft came back Tuesday and they were very positive, and a lot less extensive than the previous three batches. So hot off an intense 8 day mega redraft, followed…
This afternoon I finished the rough cut of my 7th major draft of my novel, The Darkening Dream. In my process, a rough cut is a draft (in this case v4.55 — yes you can tell I’m also a computer programmer)…
One of the weird and disconcerting things about the revision stage of novel writing is the waiting. For me a revision often goes like this: 1. Receive a bunch of notes about problems or possible improvements for the book. 2….
I work with a lot of documents. By this I mean things one reads, usually mostly text and often PDF’s or Word docs. I always did, but especially now that I’ve been writing. I have drafts of my books, drafts…