My writing week 2(28)

Hi all,

I was just reading about mega-seller Jodi Pilcout's writing day. She gets up at 5.30 and goes for a hike - doesn't say how long - and then presumably has breakie and showers and gets the kids off to school before spending the rest of the day writing until the kids return. If she has a half-hour lunch, that would be about 7 hours writing. No wonder she's written about 19 novels. But then, a little further on I read that on average she gets 250 emails a day from fans and she claims to answer every one of them. Answering 250 emails would take me more than seven hours, even if I had a series of standard cut and paste responses depending on which book they mention.

Anyway, I reckon if I had seven hours spare for writing I would quickly find other very important things to do. Some of them might even have some link to writing, like writing blog posts. Surely Jodi has a blog too, probably a couple, maybe even a PA to write them for her.

Anyway, my first week of editing Stalking Tigers under the supposed duress of deadlines did not go well. I finished redrafting chapter six and I am now editing it, but I had hoped to be nearly finished chapter seven. So what went wrong. Well, I have been recording VCR tapes onto DVDs and my VCR started to die, so I spent time fiddling with it, before going out and buying a new one. My watch band broke three times and I successfully, or so I thought, reconnected its links twice, before going out and buying a new watch. The lawns were getting a bit long, so I got out the lawn mower and its front wheel jammed, but I managed to fix it (yaaa, I didn't have to buy a new lawn mower). My printer jammed and I decided to replace its printer cartridge in the hope that might fix the problem. But when trying to cut the new cartridge out of its packet the scissors fell apart. Have I set a scene for you? Even the toilet brush broke in half while I was cleaning the toilet.

I did manage to critique a story though. I had read that one of the common faults in stories occurs when a writer glosses over action scenes, for example, instead of describing a fight, they tell the reader there was a fight and who won it - presumably the main character - and then continue on with the story. Well I finally came across one of those stories on critters. I pointed out that the author's continual baulking at action scenes destroyed any tension in the story.

I also read a few chapters of a novel for the first time in a while.

Hopefully nothing breaks on me this week so I can spend more time writing.

Graham.