NaNoEdMo wrap-up.

Well, I got to the fifty hour mark of editing in March about an hour ago, which is cutting it close. I’m tired of editing, pleased with what I accomplished, and a little disappointed at just how much more there is to do – sigh. I guess that’s the way it always goes.

I got approximately six lessons on the ‘How to Revise your Novel’ course finished – I was in the middle of lesson 8 at the start of the month, and now I’m in progress on fourteen. I learned a lot and did some great work with my book in those lessons, too.

I got some great revision done on ‘The Storm Mirror,’ polishing a charming first draft into what could, I think, be a really great finished story!

I also got some good revision done on ‘The Scroll’, especially the first sample chapter. Unfortunately, I found out yesterday that there was no space for me in the CSSF Novel workshop, as the class is being kept very small this summer. Oh, well. I still think I want to revisit ‘The Scroll’ for Camp Nano in August.

Aside from these three, a lot of my editing hours were spent on old fanfic projects, some of which I’ve already tackled in NaNoEdMo of previous years, but I’ve learned a lot more about what makes good writing since then, and polishing these stories up to post them on fanfiction.net is good practice in editing for other stories, if nothing else. Also, when I just had to get some editing in on a crazy day, (and trying to do 50 hours of editing in a month makes most days crazy,) sometimes I wanted to be able to work on something I wasn’t too emotionally invested in anymore, and just fire up the MS word grammar checker on the bus home and see what it thought about my sentence style.

Next stop – the Frenzy! It’s always a little crazy to switch from marathon editing to wildly passionate script writing on April the first.

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.

Stringing Words recruiting drive

I’m happy to announce that I’m starting a recruiting drive for Stringing Words, the writer’s forum and community that I started to admin two months ago. SW is never going to be a big place or a well-known destination, but I wanted to get the word out about what a cool site it can be and possibly attract a few new regulars, and right now, in the middle of the third Platform-building campaign, sounded like a great time to do this.

Stringing Words was originally started by three incredible writers who met each other in the on-line writing events that sprouted up as ‘spin-offs’ from National Novel Writing Month: like JanNoWriMo, NaNoEdMo, and April Fools Novelling. Along with a few other regulars, they decided to set up a year-round community to stay in touch.

One of those founding admins was Gale, a friend of mine from the Hamilton NaNoWriMo group, and now one of the Hamilton ML’s. She’s the one who got me to sign up at Stringing Words – I don’t remember exactly when, because the original version of the community got hacked and lost, before it was on its own domain.

SW has meant a lot to me over the past three years or so, and helped me to push past my old limits, both as a writer and as a person. One by one each of the founders have moved on to focus on new opportunities, most recently Misa, who
announced the publication of her novel ‘Ironhaven’ this summer. That was when I decided to take on more of a leadership role myself.

There are many things that I love about Stringing Words. It’s a community of supportive writers, it’s a great place for declaring goals that you want to accomplish and having other people hold you accountable to them, and if you need it to be, it can be a good place to commiserate about how hard it can be sometimes to write, or to procrastinate.

So, if you think that you might be a good fit, or just want to come see what the fuss is all about, I’ll give you that link again: Stringing Words.

We now return you to your regular blog programming. Six Sentence Sunday should be up in – I dunno, twelve hours or something.

Approximately 2 and a half hours to Script Frenzy…

Script Frenzy index

And I’m feeling really ready and excited!

First – the ‘after’ shot of my bulletin cork board, since last week:

Securely mounted on my bedroom wall, with 41 scene cards indicating setting, overall beat, shift in emotional tone, and a vague notion of a conflict. I’m feeling very ready, like the plan is even more together than it was for Nanowrimo last November.

National Novel Editing Month update, week 4

Total time logged so far: 46 hours, 2 minutes.

I’ve almost made it! Less than 4 hours to go in the last 3 weekdays. I can make that easily – even with Hamilton Writers’ meeting and the Script Frenzy kick-off party on my calendar. Hmm…

So here’s the headlines for my editing progress on days 22 through 28:

• More proofreading and checking of ‘Roswell Calling’, up to starting chapter 6.
• Finishing my serious changes notes of ‘The Long way Home.’
• Fixing a dozen or so unresolved problems, (marked in bracket notes) on my 2009 Nanowrimo second draft “Won’t somebody think of the children.”
• Formatting ‘The Landing’ to submit for critiques from critters.org
• Critiquing the introductory chapter of a science fiction novel, ‘Briseus’, from critters.org
• Spending a long time going back and forth between reading aloud from the opening few chapters of ‘The Long Way Home’ and making rewrites to them. In the process, I discovered that I want to change the background of one of my supporting characters, Ereyu the ferret, and I’m not entirely sure where to start with that.
• Began working on unresolved bracket notes from a Roswell fanfic, “Runaway with me,’ and that led me into a plot audit of the later chapters to figure out where there are inconsistencies that need to be fixed and plot holes that need to be closed.

As usual, I’m rather all over the map, but I think that I’ve gotten some good stuff accomplished.

National Novel Editing Month update, week 3

Total time logged so far: 32 hours, 14 minutes

I’ll have to put in quite a bit of time this coming weekend to get to fifty, but I really do think that I can make it. Since I last updated, I have…

finished the critters crit that I started last weekend, sent it in – and got a very nice thank-you note from the author for my feedback!
Finished proof-reading and spell-checking ‘The Angel’s Charlie’ – and grammar-checked it as well.
Participated in the ‘Hone your skills’ blogfest – yes, I counted the time I spent reviewing and sending feedback to other blogfesters as Edmo time, for the same reason as doing any other critiques, and I still didn’t have time to read everybody’s work, because of all the Wizard World craziness.
Began doing basic spell-checking, proof-reading, and grammar checking on a Roswell raggedy edge fanfic I finished last year, “Roswell Calling” – I’ve finished the spell-checking up to part 3 of 18, while the other stages are lagging a bit behind that point.
And I spent a lot more time reviewing notes for “The Long Way Home” and coming up with my own thoughts about what still needs editing in that manuscript.

Grammar checking with Microsoft Word is a process that I have to be careful with, I think, because while the automated tests can sometimes flag truly atrocious sentences that I never seem to notice when I’m reading the manuscript myself, and that sometimes slip by other readers – if I follow all of the suggestions about avoiding fragments and so on, I definitely I lose some of the unique voices of the characters. At some points I actually found myself growling ‘That’s voice!’ to the laptop while clicking on the ‘Ignore this rule violation’ button.

I’m not quite sure where to go next with “The Long Way Home” at this point… I might try to just pick something from the list that I’ve made that would be a fairly substantial rewrite of a scene or multiple scenes, and just start writing, in the hopes that I can get in touch with my creative side again, because my Inner Editor is all over the place and doesn’t seem to have a regimented plan for whipping the manuscript into shape. (Not that it’s in such terrible shape at the moment, but I know that it can be better, though I’m unsure about how to get there.)

One thing that was oddly fun about writing my Long-way-home list of things to fix, was getting into the possibility of powering-down my heroine’s magik arsenal, since it stands to reason that if things generally go too smoothly for your hero, taking away some of their resources or abilities and seeing them flounder a little and have to be clever about doing more with less sounds like a good tack to take. It works quite well in the Robert Asprin Myth-adventures series, actually, where for most of the books the Great Magician Skeeve has really only a few basic tricks down pat – but they’re also reasonably versatile tricks, and he’s smart about using them in fresh new ways.

Wish me luck for the final ten days of EdMo.

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?

My project tracking programs

I enjoy finding writing software to do things that are relatively personal – organizing my music or video libraries, for instance, or to help me move writing files back and forth on my Alphasmart. The first time I participated in NaNoEdMo I spent a lot of editing time on my little Tungsten Palm PDA, so that I could work on the bus, because this was before netbooks came out. And so I wrote my first version of ProjectTracker for that little PDA, with NS Basic for Palm.

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.