Tag
Today has not been my birthday; its not been an un-birthday; but it has been my book’s birthday. When I first visited Iceland in the summer of 2001 I fell in love with the landscape, the people, the history, the…
Continue readingLunch felt a bit weird today. For I don’t know how long, I’ve been munching on my sandwiches and working my way through corrections—striking through redundant words and inserting new sections and inflections. Today though, I started to sum up…
Continue readingI am at the end of things; the end of words; the end of the story. This lunchtime I reached the last page of my novel, and the last paragraph. I have made my revisions, worked through my corrections. The…
Continue readingIn revising one of my closing chapters I find that I am missing an important, linking, scene in the action. How the hell did I suppose, when writing, that I could carry my readers with my protagonists from one scene…
Continue readingWhat I want to be doing, now, is making changes from my printed and well-thumbed script into my electronic version of my novel, so that I can send it off to friends and readers. But I am sleepy. I put…
Continue readingSome days are more successful than others. Today was a successful one. Sitting with my sandwiches in one hand, pen in the other, novel before me on the canteen table, I worked as usual through the pages of part five…
Continue reading…one line, of note, that has met the axe as a result of revising my novel. Now that Hannah is Kirsten, there is no need for the authorial nod to the two Hannah/Hanna Katla conundrum. Whilst the story is better…
Continue readingHelen recently posted information about a new competition being run and I am tempted to enter Blood & Fire into it. Normally I am cautious about entering my WIP into a competition because of the fear that they will want…
Continue readingThe ‘first pass’ reading revising of Part Four is primarily for establishing where to subdivide it into (approximately) six chapters, and for refreshing my own mind over what actually happens in the chapter. It’s also useful for getting to grips…
Continue readingI’m going to try and get the revisions to part three of Blood & Fire finished by the end of this weekend, and thus reach the half-way point. The thing is, I think I’m going to have to change the…
Continue readingIâve been putting my handwritten changes to chapter 13 into the Word file. Because I was working offline with an old fashioned pen-type of arrangement I havenât seen the comments and corrections that Helen has already made to an earlier…
Continue readingThatâs it. Iâve finished revising chapter 13. It’s weird, but as I’ve been doing the revising, I have been crossing out the bits that I thought, god this is really crap, but-I-need-to-write-it-to-get-the-story-on as I was writing it, and sure enough,…
Continue readingWhen I came to make my lunch this morning I found that I had no bananas. There was a rather scrummy looking bread’n’butter pudding on offer in the canteen today. In some kind of rather flawed and backward logic I…
Continue readingMy lunchtimes (at work) recently have consisted of being evenly split between reading The Timetraveller’s Wife and revising my own nove. The former is written in first person, present tense; and the latter in third person, present tense… I’ve been…
Continue readingIn preparation for second draft revision work of Part Three of Blood & Fire I’ve been reading it through with fresh eyes. It seems to be very much a chapter of two halves. The first bit is akin to Part…
Continue readingWhilst cycling back to the Park & Ride tonight, I found my head buzzing with the closing scenes to chapter 12 (end of part two), so much so, that I had to sit in my car for about 15 minutes…
Continue readingUsually I’ve been finding time between eating my sandwiches and reading whatever book it is I’m reading (currently the third part of Kevin Crossley-Holland’s Arthur trilogy, King of the Middle March), to get a bit of work done on revising…
Continue reading1. Another perfect winter’s day with crisp, clear sunlight. Certainly a day to live for. As it turned out though, it was a day to listen to Desert Island Discs and do a bit of vacumning and cleaning. 2. Spent…
Continue reading1. Another perfect winter’s day with crisp, clear sunlight. Certainly a day to live for. As it turned out though, it was a day to listen to Desert Island Discs and do a bit of vacumning and cleaning. 2. Spent…
Continue readingAs you know I switch quite regularly between different POVs and plotlines, and I make use flashbacks in my novel Blood & Fire. I’ve just started looking at Part Two in my process of revising it, and I have a…
Continue reading
