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Progress report

Yes, we’re NaNoWriMo’ing again this year

Sherylyn and I are both doing NaNoWriMo again this year.

Neither of us are sure how we’ll go.  We know we can do 50,000 words.  We’ve both done it the last two years.

However, Sherylyn has three major end-of-year assignments due mid-November, and I have a major work release  happening late November, for which I’m already working nights and weekends.

We’ll try, but realistically both of us know that fitting in 50,000 words will be tight, and we know what’s going to suffer.  We’re already behind on the word count.

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Progress report

Another progress report

I have writer’s block with Barrain right now. I’ve gone through the first 35,000 words and done a major tidy up of what’s there (until the next draft). Now I’m onto new work, and I am procrastinating. I can’t seem to get started.

My solution.

Skip the next 10-20,000 words and leave them for Sherylyn. That’s one of the beauties of writing with a partner.

I don’t normally leave such a big chunk of writing for her when I’m writing the first draft (or in this case the third). She’s a macro and micro-type person, fixing overall problems (plot holes, continuity) or otherwise getting right down to paragraphs and words. But I am stuck, and I need to move forward.

Who knows, we may find that we didn’t need those words anyway.


p.s. Where to put the apostrophe in writer’s block elicited good discussion in this writing household, and we’re still not sure.

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Progress report

Progress report for Barrain

So it’s back to Barrain after a long time away.

37,000 words so far and this is what we call draft 3, although by our usual standards it’s more like an earlier draft.

The first thing to do is read what we have so far. I wince at the start—our starts are always bad—and read on, fixing up typos and cleaning up as I go.

One thing that strikes me reading on is how like One Man’s Treasure it is. (One Man’s Treasure is the workshop novel I have just finished a draft of.)

The main character promises to find another character’s killer (or presumed killer).

In Barrain it’s:

I will get your killer, Mathers silently promised Caid. You saved my life once, it’s the least I can do for yours.

While in One Man’s Treasure it’s:

I will find who did this and …

Hmmm. Problems already. I’ll leave that for the moment and let it percolate. It may fix itself as the story goes on. Right now I have other things to fix.

Like birdwatching. The whole kick-off point for this story is dated. No-one uses ‘bird-watching’ any more to talk about guys looking at women. And even the birders don’t do bird-watching any more. They go birding. We may have to re-write the start. It’s a pity, because I’m quite attached to the start. (A sure sign we should ditch it.)

Even Sherylyn’s okay with the bit where we introduce Scott.

I can see a huge plot hole already. Why didn’t Kraa send Taliah in to save Caid? I know where the story is going, and I know that Kraa wants Caid, not just the crystal. A dead Caid would set Kraa’s plans back 20 years. But he just sits there and watches Franz and Jacob try to kill him.

Not only that, I’m only up to chapter four and there are typos and omitted words everywhere.

Chapter five is one big info dump.

Many of the secondary characters are stereotypes (as are some of the main characters). And so on.

It’s lovely to be able to see just how bad the writing is and what needs to be fixed. The time away has given me good distance. Unfortunately, the story is only half written. If we were up to a genuine third or fourth draft here it would be perfect, because we can see the flaws so clearly.

Up to chapter 11 now. I’m reading faster and noticing less errors. I should either stop and come back to it at another time, or the story is genuinely getting better. I can’t tell which, so I stop reading for the day.

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Progress report

Progress report

Terrible progress over the last month. Work has been frantic and some personal stuff got in the way as well. Life has been one constant round of get up, go to work, come home, eat, sleep and then get up and do it all again. I’m exhausted.

Our average, over the last month and a half, has been 60 words a day.

And to think that this year I had planned to take part in NaNoWriMo. Hah.

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Progress report

Barrain – progress report

I am doing more writing, although it is not yet reflected in the word count.

A lot of it is putting back story into what has already been written.

The writing is clumsy at the moment; phrasing is awkward, with lots of cliches. Where I see them I take them out, but at the moment I figure that bad writing is better than no writing at all.

The story is much stronger.

The most interesting change to date is how Scott has become less of the main character. Taliah and Mathers are coming into it more.

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Progress report

Progress report

My little pep-talk of the other day seems to have done me some good. I’m getting back into Barrain, slowly, but steadily.

At present I am I am going back, rewriting earlier bits so that I can continue with the story in its new form. One of the reasons I got stuck is because we didn’t know why. We didn’t know why Kraa was after Caid, we didn’t know why Caid was so important, we didn’t know how Scott was going to get back home, or even why Kraa would be chasing him once he got there. Now we do.

Sherylyn and I talk about the novel, but this work is mine. She can’t do much until I have finished the draft.

You may think it strange that we don’t know important things like this well into the third draft of the story, but that’s how it works for us. And we’re not alone. After all, if it took M. Night Shyamalan five drafts in Sixth Sense to realise his protagonist was dead, and another five to tidy it up we’re up there with some of the best.

People who outline cannot imagine how we work. “All that extra rewriting you have to do.” But it works for us. It’s a bit like carving a piece of wood. You start off with a nice looking piece of timber (the idea), and you have a rough idea of what the end result will look like, but then you come to a knot, and have to carve around that, so your design changes, and then you see that with the changes you have made because of that knot then the design can be made better by changing it, and because you have made those changes you can see other changes, and so on. Until finally, you have your finished carving (novel) and it’s nothing like the original log of wood, or even what you first imagined it would be.

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Progress report

Progress report

We jumped a big chunk of text with a “fill in here” note.

It feels good, and it’s allowing us to get back into the story.

It’s funny how you can become so focussed on getting a particular scene done that it stops you cold.

It will be interesting, when we are done, to see if we even needed that scene at all. I suspect not.

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Progress report

Progress report

Latest excerpt posted. Cannot believe the book is moving so slowly. Life and work deadlines keep getting in the way. Like many would-be writers, I so want to live that dream of being able to work full-time on your novel. However, there are mortgages to meet, bills to pay.

I have set a new goal. Complete the initial write of draft three by the end of this year. Let’s see if we can do it.

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Progress report

Novel progress report

We are now a quarter of the way through the novel, and this weekend finished our first major read-through to ensure we are on track and know where we are going.

The changes we are making to this draft are major, more like a second draft that a third, but that’s writing, I suppose. Unpredictable.

In this sort of read we cover everything from major plot queries:

“I know we said the body was in stasis, but surely it would have started decomposing by now. If it hasn’t, we had better explain it far more clearly than we have.”

to minor things like:

“How many bottles of water? Ten 1.25 litre bottles is heavy. Could you even carry them?”

We will consider these and rewrite them before we add too much more stuff.

This tidying up is important. Little changes here may impact the story later. If we don’t change them now these changes turn out to be major rewrites in the next draft.

Progress overall has been slower than I would like. It has taken almost 12 months to get this far. Let’s hope the next three quarters of the book don’t take anywhere near as long.

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Progress report

Work in progress

Mathers is a wimp. He’s taken over from Scott in the wimp stakes and I’m not sure how to fix him.

All Sherylyn can say is “Really?” She is so surprised.

I think she should expect one wimp per novel. One wimp per draft, until the last draft. Maybe that’s how we’ll know when we have finished. When we know the characters are not wimps.