Blog posts with my creative writing experiments
My micro-flash memoir was featured on the Six Word site. A small success but, still, a success.
Let’s celebrate the small successes!
I’ve been so bound up in the editing of my Tang Dynasty novel , I have hardly done anything else since the New Year. And both my blog posting and my short story writing have dried up completely.
But recently my micro-flash memoir was featured on the Six Word site. A small success but, still, a success.
My 6 word memoir is here and, don’t worry, it won’t take long to read. It’s only six words, dammit.
So now I have a very, well edited first 300 words and a reasonably well-edited 10,000 words. Only 78,000 more to go!
I’m taking part in Misha and Beth’s Five Year Project and my five-year goal is to write a novel and get it published. This is both my monthly and my end-of-the-year recap on how I’m doing.
First step: write the first draft. Tick!
Second step: edit the first draft – in progress.
Continue reading “5 Year Writing Goal: end of year 2013”
Do you know the feeling when you suddenly realise you have made a horrible mistake? And does this sometimes hit you in the middle of the night? Well, that happened to me during the early hours of this morning.
I am working through the second draft of my novel, The Reluctant Scribe, set in 7th century China and the Tang Dynasty. There is a scene where I write “eight of us stood in our line on the marble step”, and another line goes “I followed the Dean who led me across the marble“, and another -“I shuffled from foot to foot, sliding my toes across the marble tiles”. I am sure there are other mentions of marble if I continue looking…
I am going to have to run a word search for every reference to ‘marble’ in my novel, and find a more appropriate replacement.
Thank goodness for technology.
That is, I am sure, only one mistake among many.
It’s finished!
My NaNo novel, Chasing Credit, is done.
Actually, hang on – NO – it’s not finished!
Although I’ve officially ‘won’ NaNoWriMo this year again, Chasing Credit is far from complete. I did pretty well, achieving 52,574 words in less than 30 days and hitting the 50,000 mark on the 25th November. But, my personal aim was to achieve 60,000 words and to have written the end of the story, leaving gaps in the middle to fill in later. So, I haven’t hit 60,000 words and I haven’t reached the end, yet.
With two half-finished NaNo novels on my hard drive, I’m determined not to have a third. This is one I must complete.
But, first things first, I am going to return to my other novel, The Reluctant Scribe. The first draft of this is finished. In fact, I finished it on the last day of October in a desperate flurry of writing in order to clear the way for the beginning of NaNo. I am nervous about the redrafting/rewriting stage, having never got this far with a novel before. Recently I’ve bought Alan Watt’s book, The 90-day Rewrite, and I hope he guides me through the process. Will start working on the re-edit on 2nd December but for the next few days I am having a welcome break.
I spent most of yesterday writing and re-writing the same scene. It is an important scene and one I wanted to get right. This morning, I went back to the same darn scene and started reworking it again. After a while, I realised I was never going to make my word count target today if I didn’t stop fiddling.
NaNo writing tip number seven
If you find yourself getting stuck on the same old scene – STOP. Move on. Write the next scene. Or skip to another part of the story, even further ahead. You can always come back later. Don’t worry about it. Just keep moving forward.
My 2013 NaNo novel is called Chasing Credit. I’m aiming for 60,000 words by the end of November.
Ruth Livingstone 