My writing week 2(11)

Hi all,

I've finished the first draft of Stalking Tigers, yaaaaa me. At 129,000 words, it's strange how it ended up at a similar length to the my 126,000 word draft of I'll Just Sit Here and Watch. I am now doing an edit and polish before sending it off to be critiqued.

I have no idea how long the edit and polish will take. The first 10,000 words should be relatively okay because that section was originally a novella which I had critiqued by a few people and then changed and edited a few times. After that, the next 50,000 words saw me stop at the end of a chapter and go back and edit it, while for the last 60,000 words I only did a bit of editing here and there. So perhaps I should try to get through the first 60,000 words in a couple of weeks and then make some sort of assessment of how long the rest will take after doing a couple of its chapters.

I have a few things I want to do while editing. First, I want to try and ensure that every chapter has a hanging ending. Second, I want to see if I can start a lot of the scenes in the middle, dive straight in without an intro and set up. Apart from those two structural issues, I'll be interested to see how often I fall into the tell, not showing trap. I envisage spending hours trying to eradicate was and as from the manuscript.

I critiqued another story last week. This one not so good. Okay idea, but the writing needed a lot more work and editing. It was probably a first draft that had only been quickly edited.

A trip to the hospital and a five hour wait for a scheduled exploratory procedure saw me do more reading then I have in a session for a while in between watching Dr Phil berate the woman who had six IVF babies and Oprah interview 60 year old loose women about sex.

I have started taking iron supplements, but they have not sent me in a flurry of creativity yet. I hope they kick in soon and have me editing a chapter a day: that should be my goal. I should try to get ahead during the beginning chapters for the expected hard slog towards the end.

Graham.