Final Edits

The second draft is complete and I’m working on the final edits for “Into the Badlands” now.

Writing and Editing “Into The Badlands”

Everybody goes through the process of writing a novel a little differently.  I’m not sure how many people write about that process; maybe they’re all too busy just following it.  That said, I thought I’d take a break and go through what’s been working for me as I cross over the halfway mark of my novel “Into The Badlands“.

As I write this I’m twelve chapters and 45,000 words into the manuscript.  For the first time ever I’ve been soliciting reader feedback (this is the first time I’ve ever considered publishing anything I wrote).  That has been instrumental in making the manuscript better and, as an unexpected benefit, has made it more enjoyable to write.  Writing is typically a solitary process, but sharing the manuscript with beta readers has allowed me to interact directly with an audience as I write.  I really have enjoyed hearing their feedback and discussing the story and the process with them as I go through it.

I’m using LibreOffice to write the book and Google Docs to share the manuscript with beta readers.  I write  a chapter then share it.  They provide feedback and I modify the manuscript accordingly.  I do this a chapter at a time; rinse, repeat.

The Value of an Outline

A few weeks ago I shored up the outline for my latest novel.  This is my second novel and the first one I’m writing using an explicit outline.  It’s an old, vetted concept that I just recently adopted, and I’ve found that writing with an outline is much better than writing without one.

Writing tends to be the easier part.  I say that not in arrogant confidence but in realistic accuracy.   I know most of my English grammar rules, I’m good with punctuation, I’m good at spelling, and I can creatively describe people, places, and things.  Once I start, the words just seem to keep flowing.

Creating something from nothing is the hard part.

A Level Playing Field

Back in the summer of 1996 I was on vacation in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina with my girlfriend and her family.  That girlfriend (who would later become my wife) and I happened to be in little mall area by the ocean one day.  There we ran across a bookstore.  Sitting at a table full of books was a writer, probably in his forties, meeting and greeting.  I was a twenty-two year old unpublished writer with dreams of breaking into the business one day, so I stopped to chat.  He seemed like a nice guy, so I bought a copy of his book.

As much as I hate to say it, the book was pretty terrible.  The grammar and spelling seemed okay, but the story itself seemed contrived and a bit silly.  I also thought it was boring.  It just seemed to lack a solid hook to keep me interested.

Turned out that he’d self-published the book.  Back in 1996 self-publishing meant a substantial cash investment followed by a campaign around bookstores trying to offload your inventory.

In other words a losing proposition.

And Then A Week Becomes A Month

I finished my short story Reflection mid-November.  I took about a week off to clear my head for the next project.

Then I had some extra stuff come up at work that required some overtime.

Then I spent a significant amount of time on reviewing our budget and trying to save our finances.

Long story short, it’s been almost a month now since I finished the story and I haven’t touched anything new.

And so it goes in the world of part-time writing for me.  I’m not going to beat myself up over it; things happen.  Programming is still my primary source of income; I have to respect that and behave accordingly.

Making Time

What I find with working a full-time gig and having two young kids and a wife is that my free time has dwindled significantly.  As a result, it’s very difficult to make good progress on a given writing project.

I know that everybody and their brother has advice about how to make time to write.  Here’s what I’ve done in the past and continue to do now, and it seems to be getting words on the page.

A Strong Web Presence

Self-promotion is something relatively new to me, at least in terms of being a writer. As I head down the path of the self-published, it’s obvious that self-promotion is going to be essential to anything resembling success.

This isn’t necessarily a clear-cut path. There aren’t any guaranteed techniques. Regardless, I’m doing a few things right now to build a strong web presence and lay the groundwork going forward.

Twitter
I’ve been on Twitter for a while now, mostly posting crap nobody really cares about. I’m repurposing my Twitter account to announce news and updates concerning my writing.

Every Word is an Investment

I keep everything I write, even the incomplete stuff.  I took a look at all my complete and incomplete works and did some word counting.  Here’s what I found:

• My incomplete works total 62,000 words
• My completed works total 153,000 words

That comes to a total of 215,000 words written.  To look at it a slightly different way, that amounts to a 29% success rate.  So for every 100 words I write, 29 of them will fail to hit the mark.

This is all old stuff, written during or before 1999.  This doesn’t include any of my newest writing (which isn’t much so far).

Outlining and Exposition

So I’m 11,000 words into my latest novel, the first novel I’ve started since completing my first and only novel in 1999, and I realize I have to stop and rethink it all.  It’s flawed, and it’s suffering from two major problems:

1. Lack of an outline
2. Too much exposition

I have notes, don’t get me wrong, and a basic idea of how I want the story to go.  But by skipping the step of creating a decent outline, an outline detailing the major sequences of the book chapter by chapter, the story is starting to meander.  As a result I’m now cutting and rewriting as I go, backtracking and losing momentum.

I also have noticed that I’m using too much exposition.  For example, my main character is a divorced man in his late thirties who moves to a new town to start over again.  I’ve spent way too much time explaining the whole history.  This is boring; no wonder I was falling asleep while I wrote it.

Simplify

Being a technical person, or a “computer geek”, I’m finding that I’m being increasingly caught up in the technical aspects of the craft of writing.  For example; I use OpenOffice LibreOffice as my word processor of choice.  Well, I’ve been through about eight different word processing programs over the years and I tend to get so caught up in the feature set and appearance that I spend less time writing and more time scouring the Internet for articles comparing LibreOffice vs. <insert program here>.

Basically they all do the same thing.  And, as a writer, I don’t need it to do much.  Just some italic text, maybe some bold, and indent my new lines.  Maybe a table of contents.  Then I’ll export to HTML and/or PDF.  Pretty simple, really.

I also run my own webserver and it’s incredibly easy to get caught up tweaking that; each upgrade takes time away.  Install a new theme?  Well, I have to tweak it to get it to work perfectly.  If I get hacked then I have to fight that fire.  In other words, the technical side in me takes over and runs amok.