My writing week 2(14)

Hi all,

It seems that editing my novel may take a while as I've spent two weeks editing chapter 27, which I eventually split into two as at 7,300 words it was getting a bit long. I've now gone back to the chapter one, where I have found myself having to introduce some of the things, people, groups, concepts that crept into the novel as I went along, so chapter one is growing too. That may not be as much of a problem as I thought because I read last week that Baen generally want manuscripts to be 100,000 -130,000 words; DAW not less than 80,000; Luna 100,000 - 150,000 and Tor doesn't mention limits. The novel I am working on is currently 132,000 words.

I did my first critique for OWWW and one for Critters.com. I will continue critiquing one story a week for critters and two a month for OWWW for the next month or so to get my critiquing ratios up before I critique a novel on one while continuing doing stories on the other and then vise versa.

I read most days last week again. So I had a reasonably committed writing week last week.

I had a look at www.scribd.com after reading a rather alarming article by Jason Steger in The Age. He called it the literary version of Youtube and said that it might speed up the process of people uploading copyrighted books onto the Web for others to download for free, sort of like napster. He pointed out that 3,300 people had illegally downloaded The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga.

I wasn't that impressed with the site, finding nothing of interest. Some people where using it in what seemed a vain attempt to market their books by having the first couple of chapters of their book for free to download and read. No one much seem to be taking up the offer. Does anyone ever do that? I've never read the first couple of chapters of a book online and then gone out and purchased it. I'm not the sort of person who stands in a bookshop and reads the first few pages of a book either. I decide on the author, blurb, word-of-mouth or book review.

The Scribd site managers say they will remove any copyrighted works from the site, when requested. It seems inevitable that what happened to music will happen to books, but probably not to such a great extent, as there are many like me who can't stand reading off a computer screen, and who much prefer the aesthetics of book over a bundle of stapled A4 pages. And besides, I would never download an illegally uploaded novel as I have to much admiration/empathy for an author to steal royalties from them.

Graham.