I only managed to get 43 pages into my editing. Still have 80 left. I could probably get through another 20 or 30 before the contest ends, but it’s late, I’m tired, and I have to work tomorrow.
I don’t have anything more to say at this point. I’m tapped out. Still need to print my MS and mail it out. I’ll do some kind of a postmort later this week.
Good night and good luck.
END
Hurray! That gives me just 5 hours to edit this monstrosity.
I think Carrie may be cracking under the strain. I haven’t been easy to live with, I realize.
That gives me just 0.5 hours to repair relationship and 4.5 hours to edit novel. I can do this, I can do this.
Everything is by the clock now.
Dear Future Jeff:
Please keep the following points in mind as you continue writing in the future.
- Alcohol does not in any way help writing.
- Sweets do not in any way help writing.
- Rest is very important.
- Food is very important.
- It’s ok to write florid prose in a first draft. It helps get all the junk out of your head and onto the paper. After that, be ruthless cutting out the fluff.
- Master outlines are not helpful.
- Outlines brainstormed on the fly in positions of stuckness are very helpful.
- It’s actually much harder to throw in obscene, bloodthirsty, salacious stuff when you know you have an audience. This means you’re either a coward or deep down just a nice guy. It’s something to think about as you pick your themes and topics in the future.
- You should probably be a little bit worried by all of the obscene, bloodthirsty, salacious stuff that pops into your head when you’re trying to figure out how to get a slow story moving again.
- Page counts and wordcounts are useful at the beginning–they give you small goals to aim for along the way.
- Formatted manuscripts have a lot of white space.
- Page counts are almost useless in the endgame. Don’t cheat the ending just because you’ve achieved your artificial math goal.
- The most anxious times are when you’re not writing. You probably won’t believe this, but try to remember that you actually feel a lot better when you’re writing than you do when you’re pacing around thinking about writing.
- Work on endurance so that you can sit in front of the computer longer. It’s easy to quit and hard to start again.
- Mornings are just awful. Get your shower, eat something, and get on with it. You’ll feel better eventually.
- You seem to be inspired by clever ideas more than engaging stories. That might be just the way you are as a writer, or it might be something to work on the next time you take a class.
- Even the most basic editing takes more time than you imagine.
- There is no such thing as too much editing.
- Editing is actually kind of fun! Use it to redeem yourself from the awfulness of your writing, and you may actually walk away feeling good about yourself.
Warmest regards,
Now (AKA “Past”) Jeff
If I ever have the heart to come back to this thing after the contest is over, I’m going to delete about 75% of its adjectives and adverbs. Why are my first drafts always so baroque?
I’m so close, but I’m having a hard time hitting my stride this morning. The ending is still in doubt, I have anxieties about all the length/formatting rumors that seem to be running around among the 3-D writers, and I keep getting distracted with the fantasies about how great it’s going to be to be done.
30 minutes ago, I hated my story, which has morphed into an eco-political sci-fi horror romance. I hated it like a thing outside of myself. I should just nuke all of my characters and be done with them and their stupid nonsense lives. I’m sick to death of their saccarine dialogue. What’s wrong with these people?
Last night was pretty restless. Didn’t get to bed until 2 a.m., probably didn’t fall asleep for another hour. I feel exhausted, but not quite as bad as I did on day 1.
Sometime in the early morning I woke up (not really woke up, but came into consciousness of some sort. If you’re a chronic sleepwalker like me, you understand). Anyway, I sort of woke up on the floor, rooting through my dirty clothes.
As I recall, I was looking for my swimsuit–actually for a speedo, which I don’t own at the moment. I was pretty sure I’d left it somewhere and that I urgently needed it before I could go back to bed. I tried to explain this to Carrie, which made me start to wake up a bit and realize that this didn’t make a lot of sense. But clearly that was her fault, not mine.
I went back to bed wondering how I was ever going to fall asleep again without my speedo. But if my wife really doesn’t want me have my speedo, then fine with me. Whatever!
It can’t be a coincidence that the two major themes of my blog and my novel and my current life are consuming and sleeping.
That was nice… formatted my document the way a manuscript is supposed to be formatted (apparently… I’ve never submitted on before) and my page count jumped way up. It feels like cheating, but I double-checked the formatting with multiple sources. Everone seems to agree: chapters titles always start a new page and they start about a third of the way down the page.
So that means I can pretty much relax now as far as the page count is concerned, and focus on doing the story justice. I guess that’s the way it should have been to begin with, but the numbers help me keep going.
If anyone’s still reading… sorry this is getting so boring. Most of my creativity is going into the story right now, so these blog entries are starting to get a little dry.
I’m boring myself, even, and I can talk a lot about myself before I get bored. I’ll try again in the morning.
This story is making me queasy. I want to write about pretty things now. Maybe I will come out on the other side of the contest writing nothing but lyrical verse.
