Let the rewrites BEGIN.

So...

Are you ready for good news?? My dear friend and beta Siobhan said the words, "I'll be mailing you your edits next week." Everybody prepare yourselves, because the editing will be fast, and will probably be furious. As soon as that package arrives I will be ON IT.

I'm ready for them, though. I've had some time and distance since I gave them to her (last July) and since I have worked on the story itself, so I will be focusing hard on getting everything just right. I have some ideas already about what I want to change (in particular, adding in more conflict; I don't know that the story has enough conflict between characters, specifically.) I can think of a few scenes I'd like to write, as well, so I can't wait to get to doing that as soon as possible!

I may get to post the first chapter soon! Hopefully, I'll be posting more regularly on this blog as my account becomes more active.

This story has been almost four years in the making, and I can't wait to share it with everyone!

The Battle Begins

I've had the first two chapters of The Battle written for a while now. Okay, not a LONG while, but the first chapter, the prologue, I initially wrote as a prologue to The Shift, and Chapter 1 is, you will see, the same as Chapter 13 of The Shift, but told from a different point of view. I wrote those two chapters at the same time (like literally two documents splitting my screen and typing each paragraph by paragraph!) so I don't exactly count that as beginning the second story in my mind.

Well, I started properly writing The Battle about a week ago. I haven't got much other than a few scenes during bus and train rides, and it's not quite complete yet, but I thought I would share this moment with you all to celebrate!

I've outlined the story (thanks to a very demanding beta and an afternoon in Starbucks) and while I haven't by any stretch of the imagination finished editing The Shift, I am very excited to finally be moving forward with the story. I've been putting a lot of pressure on myself to get this second story right, and so finally beginning to write has already begun to ease my mind!

Looking forward to posting!

Betas!

Bonjour, blogosphere!

At the moment, I am currently studying in Oxford for a few weeks, so the blogging may be a little slower (not that it's ever been particularly fast!) and the posts a little bit more spacey on my part (I am taking two pretty intense English classes here and I hope that I can devote some brain power to other things, like tourism while I'm here!)

But the good news is that my dear beta, Siobhan, now has my entire story in her grubby paws, both in digital and hard copy, so whenever she gives it back to me I can begin posting! I am hoping that I will be able to post on a weekly basis, but Siobhan is the decision-maker on that front, really. So go harass her if you don't hear from me! ;)

See y'all soon, and I hope you do enjoy what I've been working on for the last two and a half years!

Second Drafts!

Bonjour, blogosphere!

Yesterday, due to what I am now calling the "Great Tire Debacle of 2011", I found myself presented with two screws in my tire, an incompetent AAA dispatch, and about 5 hours of free time waiting around for my tire to be fixed. Although I had not intended to spend the day waiting around for the tire, I had intended to do a lot of waiting around for other reasons, and so I found myself with my laptop, my first draft of The Shift and a whole lot of waiting at the Costco.

Now, Costco doesn't have wifi, so I set to finishing implementing the edits into the digital copy. It took well over three hours, but I eventually did finish! Hooray!

What does this mean for you, dear friends and readers? It means you are one step closer to seeing my story posted and published! Siobhan and I are going to attack the manuscript with a vigor none have ever seen before, and I think, god willing, that I'll be able to begin the posting soon.

The Battle, its sequel, is well into the planning stages and, while I can't make any promises, I fully intend to begin writing it as soon as I begin posting The Shift!

More soon. :)

Gripes about edits

It occurs to me that, as much as I love writing and as much as I love editing, I'm not as much of a fan of actually implementing my own edits into my works.

It's not to say that I don't love to EDIT my own stuff, because I do. I wouldn't have printed out my manuscript if I hadn't (and I did - all 100 pages of it). There is something to say about the track changes feature in Microsoft Word: you edit, it shows what you edit, you accept the changes without having to think twice about them. It's easy, it's breezy, (it's Covergirl!) it's efficient. But I certainly wouldn't have worked as hard as I did on my edits if I had only done them on the computer. Putting them down on the page, the kinesthetic aspect of the project makes me happy and makes me consider my words more. I have heard that the brain functions differently when looking at the screen vs. looking at the page, and while I can't provide evidence of that, I can certainly vouch that I am a better editor when faced with the printed page.

But it certainly frustrates me that there is no "easy" button when it comes to transferring my edits from the printed page to the digital one. It is slow going, and already all of the work is done for me! It is silly, but I would love to hand this over to someone else to do it for me. However, this kind of grunt work is something I will be doing and so should be doing on my own.

So here I am, sitting in a coffee shop with my brother while he fills out job applications (and complains about it every five minutes), editing my story.

My current goal is to finish this before I go to Oxford in two weeks. Well, 17 days. Back to the edits I go!

Finished Edits

Today, (after much distraction,) I finally finished my initial edits of The Shift! I am so excited, I am going to begin typing them up later today, and hopefully I'll be able to get them off to Siobhan in good time to begin posting toward the end of the summer!

Just thought I would keep you guys posted!

Best threat ever

I finally returned a chapter to one of my writers (after holding onto it for about a month, whoops!), and her response was this:

Thank you so much. And tomorrow I send you more (A red eyed Canon Edward in his vigilante phase will patrol you house, so that you don't stray).

Teehee. I will be sure to lock my door.