making books: progress reasons i suck the boy the buried king the wife words
by Harry Connolly
2 comments
Head, meet wall
I’m trying to get a package together for my agent (sample chapters and selling synopsis, basically) and sweet mole sauce, have I been struggling. The last couple of months have been stressful–I don’t need to review, do I? Good.–and my daily word counts have been small. Now that I’m in the revision phase, I’m finding all sorts of repetitive and contradictory stuff in there. Characters are introduced twice, the protagonist discusses a clue with a character then decides to hide the info from him 50 pages later, the protagonist is confused by changes to a building he said he’d never seen before.
It’s a damn dirty mess. I really need to work faster on these early drafts, if only to save myself time and effort during revisions.
Anyway, I picked up a bunch of weird books at a yard sale today, and I’ll be slipping out of the library as soon as I dig up a movie for the family to watch tonight. We have a big afternoon of de-cluttering planned, although it remains to be seen which family members will be willing to get rid of some of their belongings (me) and which will not (them). Wish me luck.
*Some* writers work on each sentence or paragraph until they’re happy with it, then move on without ever looking back.
I hate them.
Good luck! I’ve found that “writing” is actually composed of one part rough draft and ten parts revision. Wait, that’s not a good thing to tell you right now . . . I mean, revision is easy! And fun! Like I said, good luck. Godspeed. Treat yourself to lots of coffee.