Tag Archives: rewriting

RoW80 Update: January 25th!

“Lookie here.” There was a grin lurking deep in the shadows of his helmet. “I caught myself a little snake.”
But snakes were known to bite.

Thanks to a coworker with a bad rash (another consequence of which was my inability to keep from making jokes about herpes), I wound up without my usual Monday off, which was a total bummer and makes for a pretty anticlimatic and uneventful Wednesday RoW update. I’ve been doing a little bit here and there when I can, but time has been the complete opposite of bountiful these past few days. Let us see, however, what the cards will lie:

Serpent in a Cage: The rewrite is coming along steadily, but that’s mostly because the Prologue will stay the same, so I’ve just been transcribing and tweaking that a little bit, about a page a day since I started, which lands us currently on page 6. Things won’t start changing until the first chapter, so I’ve got a day or so to go until things start to get really interesting.

Bowlful of Bunnies: I’m not going to lie; typing up Lightheart might have been a bad move. The first two parts of it are awesome, but the second two are so terrible that I half wonder how I ever let this thing see the light of day back in college. I’d love to work with the first part, but it’s going to take a lot more work than the time I allotted for this project, so I might just boot it and save it for another time. I’m worried about having enough material for a short story collection, to be honest, and I mostly blame the blow to my ego that was the second two parts of Lightheart. I’ve got a few more stories to type up and we’ll see if I feel better about them, but I’m thinking of possibly readjusting my goal and trying the new chick lit idea I had to fit the bill for my Test Run on e-publishing. We’ll see where we are on Saturday. I’m not about to let one bad story derail the whole project so swiftly.

But I think I might open the floor a little for suggestions here, considering I’ll have to produce enough new material for half of the collection: What do you like to read in a collection< of short stories? Do you like a lot of variety, or do you tend to prefer stories that are all similar in some way? Do you like funny stories, serious stories, bizarre stories best? What are some of your favorite short stories or short story authors that I might turn to for inspiration? Do you like shorter ones? Longer ones? A good mix of both? I’d be interested to hear what everyone thinks so I can get some ideas.

The 100 Books Project: I know I’ve been promising a review since Sunday’s check-in, but finishing up the first book is taking a little longer than anticipated, since I have to read everything, and what I thought was just a short preview of the author’s other books at the end of the novel is turning out to be, like, four or five chapters each, and it’s not getting me to the end end as quickly as I’d have liked. At this rate, I’ll have finished my 700+ book for the Tea and Books Challenge first! Only 150 pages away! Whoo hoo! I cannot end this month without any books read, even if I’m within about 100 pages of finishing three different books, so I think I’ll be good.

Black Dome Society: I wrote….three sentences of it since the last check-in! That’s three sentences more than I had anticipated, so I’ll take it as a win. The problem with working with other people on a project is that you have to have the other person there to work with you on it, otherwise, it just seems pointless. So who knows what the fate of this piece will be.

Blogging: I’ve been keeping up with a comment-a-day, a post-a-day (if you don’t include Saturday), and I have almost twice as many views this month as I did any month last year. Man, I hope I can keep that up, but it’s all about getting yourself out there and making connections, and I look forward to doing a lot more of that in February. Thanks so much for everyone who has been contributing to make my numbers look so good and make me all warm and fuzzy inside.

So how’s it going for everyone else? It feels like I’m doing a lot of tweaking this round, which is part of the beauty of RoW80, but I think part of that is due to the fact that my goals were pretty loose to begin with. Next round, I should consider something more specific, but, until then, I’ll keep plugging away at these ones and trying (though mostly failing) at visiting my fellow RoWers here!

Happy Writing!

Author Quotes: Jute.

“Good novels are not written, they are rewritten. Great novels are diamonds mined from layered rewrites.” -Andre Jute.

This morning, while I was struggling to think of something to write in this blog today, I was also struggling with the words I had written yesterday for the 6 Month Challenge. I wasn’t pleased with how I had started. It begins with an approach to the setting, and the character exploring it for the first time, which I felt was getting heavy on description, and I wondered if it might have been better to start the story with the main character already there, and experiencing the setting not for the first time, still with a veneer of newness, but also with a bit more familiarity. I thought of rewriting it; it’s still early in the game, but then I remembered that I can merely change it in the revision.

My love for revisions and rewrites is one of the most profound changes in my writing recently, and I believe it is easily the most effective. In this respect, I absolutely love Andre Jute’s quote here, especially as I’m working on bringing Serpent in a Cage out of a mediocre rough draft into a better second draft and, eventually, probably a third and forth draft, too. Sometimes, it astounds me how much work it is, but, at the same time, I know that, until I’ve rung it through several rewrites until there’s nothing left to be changed, I will not be satisfied and anything less will be full of regrets.

Six months to write a novel? Easy. But how long does it take to make a novel? That’s what I’m excited to find out.

And A Round of Words in 80 Days starts tomorrow! I’m so excited! Will I be seeing any of you there?

What’s your connection with rewriting and revising? Are you a serial reviser? Do you dread all the tweaking and fixing? Do you agree with Jute’s words?