Nanoedmo update – week 2

Well, it looks like the NaNoEdMo forums are back up, and hours logging should be online soon. As for myself, I’ve been plowing along pretty well, counting my time for the Holly Lisle course work and any other editing that I’ve done. I’m up at 23 hours now, which is pretty good for day 14.

One trick that has really helped has been my calendar. For March, I decided to do something a little bit different to keep track of EdMo stuff – I write an E on teh calendar whenever the hours tracker ‘ticks over’ to a new hour, and try to mark at least one E every day. Sometimes that isn’t a full hour per day – I had some odd minutes heading into Comicon weekend that I used up, because I didn’t take a netbook with me on the bus to Toronto and didn’t have that much time to edit after I got home.

But it’s been great to see multiple Es on some days, including the first weekend, and Wednesday a week ago, when I went to the Monastery.

Aside from the Holly Lisle stuff, I’ve been working on chapter 1 of The Scroll, on a revision of The Storm Mirror, and some of my old Roswell fanfics, which I just wanted to polish up a little before posting on fanfiction.net — that makes them ideal for when I don’t want to work on editing anything that I feel might be high pressure.

Are there any other EdMo’s out there among my followers? How’s it going? If not, what’s been keeping you busy in March?

National Novel Editing Month preparation

It’s only a few days until the arrival of March, and as I have for many years now, I’m going to join in the NaNoEdMo challenge – completing fifty hours of editing work within March. It’s not a very popular event, but I find that taking this time as winter turns into spring to concentrate on the tough work of revision and rewriting is one of my favorite markers on the year-long writer’s calendar.

So, as February winds to its close, I’m putting together a list of editing tasks that I can work out my fifty hours of self-imposed hard labor on. It helps to have a reasonable variety, so that if I get blocked on one project or simply sick of it, I can switch to another one.

Here’s some of what I’ve got lined up:

• Rewriting the sample chapters of ‘The Scroll’ to send in to Kij at the CSSF – I want to have this ready to go by March 9th, before I head off to the HobbyStar Toronto March Comiccon.
• ‘How to Revise your Novel’ coursework and exercises on “Won’t somebody think of the Children.” I’ve nearly finished the triage phase of HTRYN, and so the ‘Major Surgery’ lessons are coming up just in time for Edmo!
• First rewrite of ‘The Storm Mirror’ – I liked a lot of things about the first draft, but it was very rambly, coming in at over 8000 words, and I think that a lot of them can be cut.
• Third draft of ‘Father Ismay,’ which I’ve been procrastinating on all month. Maybe that was just my subconscious telling me that it was a NaNoEdMo job.

• Doing quick cleanup on some fanfic so that it’s fit to be posted up on fanfiction.net (which isn’t a terribly high bar. )
• Doing a critique for critters.org, and possibly other feedback for other writers. Good critiquer karma is definitely a part of Edmo!
• Possibly rewrites of ‘Shuttle Fidelity’ or ‘Project Fast Track’.

Do you have anything particular planned for March? If you’ve got editing work to be done, I do recommend checking out the NaNoEdMo home page. The forums are a bit ghostly and spammy at the moment. I need to try to generate a little good chatter over there. Editors don’t always have time to gabble at each other online, though.

Critique tracking via spreadsheet

Well, the new draft of “The Landing” has been finalized, and sent off both to Chris McKitterick at the CSSF in Kansas, but also to Lightspeed magazine.

I was more than a little daunted by the prospect of going through the seventeen different critiques I received on the story from critters.org, ranging from one short paragraph all the way up to one critique approximately three-quarters the word count of the submitted story! I copied them all from my gmail into a single text file on Thursday night, and tried to go over some of them Friday night at Runnymede, but didn’t really get that far.

So, yesterday night, I finally got systematic. I set up an Excel spreadsheet file, starting one tab with a list of the different critiques, including the origin email, the starting and ending position in my text file, and working out how long each critique was in lines. This was then sorted in ascending order of length, so that I could start with the shorter critiques and work up progressively through longer and longer ones.

(I formatted the email addresses in white on a white background, to preserve the anonymity of critters.)

Reading aloud and adding extra pages.

Well, it’s late, and I’ve spent a lot of the evening reading my Script Frenzy screenplay aloud to myself, which is a really good way of doing editing I usually find – a lot of simple changes and alternate phrasings just seem to come to me when I’m reading my own words out. But it does take some time.

I wanted to get the script in good shape to print a full copy out and show it off at the writers’ circles this week, maybe even give it to somebody else to review for a few weeks before giving it back to me. There was a gentleman at the New Writing Workshop last time who seemed very interested and knowledgeable about screenwriting.

So I’ve finished editing the entire project, (very casually, but that’s okay for a first printing I think,) and sent it off to Staples. This is the first time I’ve used a print shop since getting my Brother laser printer on boxing day, because I really wanted to get the full professional treatment on this – double-sided pages, spiral binding, stiff cardboard covers, and the whole thing. So I guess I’ll be heading over to the Staples on Barton street after work tomorrow to pick it up.

Interestingly enough, Staples printing price structure gives you a noticeable price break at 100 pages – you’d pay nearly two dollars more to print only ninety-nine. And after making a few of my changes and deleting some extraneous dialog, I was down to ninety-nine pages. Looked around in the Celtx options for anything that would take up another page, and found the choice to add a few extra lines before each scene header. Good enough, back to one hundred pages.

Except I realized that the price was going up quite a lot when I picked the option to actually have the title page printed out on the cover, and then realized that was because it didn’t count the title page as one of the hundred anymore. I was down to ninety-nine, and Celtx doesn’t let you just type in blank lines at the end of the project and print them off.

I actually tried typing in a lot of lines with just a . after each, but that didn’t look too good, and I thought of something else.

Hard page breaks!

I inserted hard page breaks around my act breaks, and that got me back up. 101 pages out of Celtx, which goes down to 100 after the title page is diverted to the cover. Excellent stuff.

I’m off to sleep now.

National Novel Editing Month update, week 2

Total time logged so far: 23 hours, 38 minutes

I guess EdMo is still going fairly well for me, though I’d hoped to be already past the halfway point, especially as I probably won’t be able to do much catchup this coming weekend, as I’m going to the Wizard World Toronto Comic Con Convention! But still, I’ll figure out some way I’m sure.

Being able to go back and forth between several different projects helps to keep my energy levels up for editing, I’ve noticed. Over the past seven days, I have:

1. Finished reading ‘The Chosen’ Novel manuscript.
2. Put together my overall critique comments ‘The Chosen’ to accompany the inline notes I made as I was reading.
3. Also wrote some overall thoughts for a fanfic that I finished reading through in February, “A Kiss to build a dream on.”
4. Completed a short story critique for critters, and read through another critters entry making notes as I went.
5. Spell-checked and proofread 6 chapters of my Nanowrimo 2010 manuscript, ‘The Angel’s Charlie’.
6. Made a few more tweaks and revisions to ‘The Landing’ in preparation to submit it for Odyssey.
7. Went through a critique of ‘The Long Way Home,’ made most of the minor changes, and started thinking about the issues raised that would take more serious reworking.

The thought of making more serious changes to ‘Long Way Home’ is somewhat daunting – this critique has brought up several items that I think could really make the book better, including:

• Revising certain scenes to make sure that the characters all have unique voices and the dialog flows with style.
• Changing the way I handle some of the flashbacks – the reader thought that the way I was always going into flashback when my MC was knocked out or went to sleep was confusing.
• Raising the dramatic stakes by torturing my main characters a little and having them go through more hardships, because the current storyline actually has a lot of breaks going their way from the start.

I do want to tackle some of this before March is over, so maybe I should be careful to not spend all of my time on the more minor revisions and critiquing other people’s work.

I know that there are a few of you crusaders out there editing – any updates from your part of the world?

National Novel Editing Month update, week 1

But first! A scheduling update, as promised.

I said that I’d be adjusting the Kelworth Files schedule, and the fact that I’m not doing a Crusader spotlight tonight is evidence of that. I’ve finished off another series, “Blog the Cat” screenwriting, and there’s a few short features that I want to start for March, and a scheduling conflict with Wednesdays. So, here’s what the rundown looks like for the next few weeks, before A to Z hits and leaves the entire blog a mash of Frenzied chaos…

Nanoedmo updates will be Mondays, as the month of March started on a Tuesday and thus each week ends on Monday, so I can do roundups for week 1, 2, 3, and so on.

Similarly Script Frenzy preparation will be covered on Fridays, as I can do ’3 weeks until Script Frenzy is here’, ’2 weeks…’ etcetera, since the 1st of April will be a Friday.

The ‘Wizard of Mars’ chapter reviews will be staying on Wednesday for this week, and then moving to Sunday, since there are two upcoming blogfests that are scheduled for Wednesdays. (I suppose that Sundays will also leave me free to continue doing reviews in April without needing to worry about alphabet letters, if I have the energy to, otherwise it may go on hiatus until May.) Do stay tuned to A wizard of Mars, as some very interesting things are coming up in the next few chapters!

In light of all of this,  the Crusader spotlight feature will be moving to Tuesday. It looks like off-topic Thursday is staying put, and sharing exercises moving to Saturday, though either of them might get bumped in favor of Crusader business.

Okay, with all of that explained, let’s get to Nanoedmo.

Trying to tie up plot holes?

I’ve been working since October (but not during Nano,) to complete a basic first-pass edit of one of my Roswell fanfiction stories, ‘Runaway with me.’ It’s fairly basic stuff – some spelling and grammar checking, basic proofreading, changing phrasing here and there for better phrasing – and also just keeping track of places where the need for more in-depth changes seems glaringly obvious to me. In those spots, I tend to put a very terse note to myself in [square brackets] and just move on. For instance. [Review this for consistency with chapter 17 later.]

I’m noticing a lot of places where I’m needing to put in square brackets, partly because the story was one that I didn’t plan out too much beyond a vague notion of where I wanted some of the plot beats to be going, (Organic Linear Plotting, they call that,) and maybe because it was one of the projects that I would work on for a little and then leave alone for weeks or months at a time.

Among some of the issues that I remember flagging are:

- I’ve included references to later aspects of the mythology of the tv show, such as the Granilith, dream archetypes, and even the Destiny book, that are almost entirely contradicted by the ending that I ended up tagging onto the story.

- Since I couldn’t figure out a good ending to a chase scene at a time, I ended up skipping ahead, describing the aftermath as Max and Liz return to Roswell, and have them figuring out what happened bit by bit, piecing clues together. Unfortunately, not all of the clues mesh perfectly, and there’s at least one place where a particular character, who would know the entire story, keeps procrastinating on filling in the blanks for the other characters, until I forgot that she knows things that she still hasn’t told them, and doesn’t mention it again.

- Somebody spills a drink, and the fact that the broken glass appears unbroken later on is a plot clue – but I described the original spill without mentioning the glass getting broken.

- For some reason, when describing a characters homework, I appear to have made up a poet named Willis Chesterley. Not a horrible thing, but I’d like to find a real poet that fits the reference I think.

- The fact that one character has had her appearance shifted to resemble somebody else, and I think that I have the same characters suspecting this two or three different times without any mention that it’s a thought that’s occurred to them before.

It’s a story that I do really like parts of, but hopefully I’ll be able to figure out a way to sort out a few of the small issues like these without causing other problems or being forced to cut out the parts that I like.

Workshop Portfolios

I’ve only mentioned it here in passing, but I’m seriously planning to get to a six-week genre writing workshop for the summer of 2011. I’ve researched three of them: Clarion, Clarion West, and Odyssey, and I’ve gotten approval to take some unpaid sabbatical time in addition to my paid vacation if I’m accepted to one of them.

That’s getting to be the crucial point. The window for applications to Clarion opened on December 1st, just as I was recovering from Nanowrimo and getting myself back onto Eastern Standard Time. Deadline for applications to Clarion and Clarion West are both on March 1st, 2011

However, what I’m confident in submitting for my portfolio is starting to become a little clearer.

For a while, I guess I was confused by the different requirements for portfolios to all 3 workshops. But taking a good hard look at them, some of the complications prove to be meaningless for me:

Clarion wants 2 different short stories, between 2500-6000 words each.

Clarion West doesn’t mention word counts at all, but wants from 20-30 pages of work sample in manuscript format, which looks like it would be around 4500-6800 words.

Odyssey wants a sample of no more than 4000 words. Clarion West and Odyssey both suggest that a complete story would be good if possible, but don’t insist on it.

And in reviewing my available stories, I sidelined three of them pretty quickly. “The artifact” is still very rough, which is understandable considering that I conceived it and wrote it in five days in an unfamiliar city. Which is what I’ll have to be doing over and over again for these workshops, apparently, but I don’t necessarily need to pick a story for my portfolio on that basis.

“Wolves of Wyoming” and “The case of the Wizard’s vice” are in better shape, but I’m not that confident about either of them considering that they’d have a strike anywhere I’d be submitting them. They’re fantasy, and though Clarion and Clarion West don’t rule out including other fiction genres in the portfolio, (Clarion West even makes a point of saying that in their FAQ,) they ARE specifically Science Fiction workshops. And both stories are around 5,000 words, so I’d need to trim them down for Odyssey.

That leaves me with ‘Harry and Mars’, ‘The Landing’, and ‘Exploration and Evaluation.’ I do like ‘Harry’, though it got a somewhat mixed response at Hamilton Writers last night… it’s short enough that I can expand the characterization somewhat (which it badly needs,) and still fit the Odyssey word count. The new draft of ‘The Landing’ was received very well by Hamilton Writers when I brought it back to them in September, and it should fit in the middle of the page count guidelines for Clarion West. Once I’m comfortable with them, I can submit them both for Clarion. ‘Exploration and Evaluation’ is less strong overall, but can stand as an alternate just in case I see some flaw in one of the other stories that I can’t fix at the last moment.

One thing that I’m considering trying with ‘Harry and Mars’ would be a significant change that might make the word count explode, but I think that it’s still worth a try. As written, the first draft concerns a suicide on the first successful mission to Mars, and that was probably part of the original idea that I had when I started writing it back in September.

Somebody at the meeting mentioned “One problem I have is that it’s not that sudden, when you decide that you’re going to kill yourself,” and it sounded like he knew at least a little of what he was talking about. That got me to thinking, what if the first suicide attempt wasn’t successful, if they get to Harry in time to save her life – then what? Can they really keep one member of a five-person crew on suicide watch? With that change, I was also considering changing my POV from Harry herself to Charlie, the engineer, who could be the one who saves her.

Okay, I think that that’s enough blog rambling for tonight. Wish me luck with all my portfolio stuff, everybody!

UPDATE: I’d also like to announce to anybody who cares, that I expect this blog will remain proudly snow-free for the holiday season. The Weather Network is telling me that I’ll be getting enough of the stuff outside over the next few weeks, so I don’t intend to let snow into my cyber-world!

Rewriting a story in four days.

I’ve been wanting to get back to talking about writing here on the blog, so here’s a good bit to blather on about, I think. Rewriting an incomplete story idea from scratch.

I’ve had the idea for this ‘alien landing’ story for going on a year now, I think – I did a starting paragraph for it based on a challenge at Stringing Words in October of 2009, (wow, didn’t realize it was that long until I looked it up,) and I started my first draft in May of this year. It was going pretty well – four scenes, 3200 words, and then it just kind of ran into the ground at the point that the alien attacked the human soldiers.

The basic premise, by the way, is that an alien ship lands on Earth, damaged from a battle with other aliens – they need help to fix the ship, but they’ve still got powerful weapons that can hold their own against anything the Army throws against them, so both sides are forced to bargain in the end.

I asked other writers for feedback on what I had so far – I read it for the Hamilton Writers’ group on June 1st, I think, and got some interesting perspectives, including how soldiers should talk in a much grittier and fouler fashion, and some encouragement, but I still wasn’t sure how to continue, and put it aside to focus on other things, like the CreateSpace draft of ‘The Long Way Home’, JulNoWrimo… and starting my blog.

In August, I submitted the two longer scenes in CritMo, and the crits that I got managed to perfectly clarify what I needed to go. Over and over again, they kept repeating, ‘I like Doctor Juddman, I like the alien, I like the language stuff, I don’t care about the two army commanders butting heads.’

So I did a page one rewrite, telling the entire story in Doctor Juddman’s point of view, how he was whisked out of his office at UBC to go talk to an alien, and what happened after the alien attacked him and held him captive for nearly 24 hours in his spaceship.

It’s still a rough draft at this point, 5400 words, but it’s a complete first draft, and I’m happy about it. Thinking about taking this one to Hamilton Writers this week, to see what they think of the difference.

Do any of you readers have a story to share about rewriting stories quickly?

And thank you very much for the awards, Brittany. I’ll talk more about those soon – hopefully Saturday.

CritMo has set sail…

Next stop? A magical land where respectful, authentic, and specific feedback flows like – I dunno, maple sap or something?

So – over at Stringing Words, we’ve started doing a Critiquing Month, or CritMo. I volunteered to organize it, since there were interested writers, but all of the usual SuperAdmins seemed to be a bit too busy to jump at doing the legwork this time. Though SW has had 2 CritMos before, this is also the first time I’ve participated.

So far, it’s been a lot of fun, and very instructive. The basic idea was simple – you sign up to contribute a certain number of excerpts, and you’re assigned to critique two other pieces for each piece you contribute, so that each excerpt has at least two assigned critiquers. Along with your excerpt, you provide some questions or notes for what sort of feedback you’re interested in, and then you read the pieces that you’ve been assigned to critique and do your best to provide good feedback.

By the way, when I was blogging about what makes a good critique in early July, I was already planning for CritMo – I believe I mentioned that at the time.

So, this time we’re doing week by week assignments, four week-long periods during the month of August, and the first week is nearly drawn to a close – it goes until Tuesday night. I’ve finished the three critiques I signed up for this week, (we agreed to try a variation where people can pledge to do a third crit in the hopes of getting a third crit on their own work,) and received one critique on the lead-in to a fantasy short story.

Here’s what I’ve learned so far:

Reading for feedback, and composing feedback, can be very hard.

In the end, it’s so very worth it.

However, I’ve been so focused on CritMo that I haven’t really started on the 3 longer pieces that I’ve agreed to do feedback swaps on. Oh well, I’ll get to them – and I didn’t promise a particular completion date to anybody at least.

And, as a followup to my saga of mixed-up reservations in Huntsville, Saturday turned out to be a non-event. I packed up all my stuff carefully to take to the new room, went to the front desk – and was told that they’d arranged things so that I could stay in the same room until Tuesday. Ah well, at least it’s a nice room, and no stairs out to the lobby,