Tag Archives: editing

First draft finished!

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Ahead of schedule, I finished the first draft of my novel last night.  It stands at 287 pages, 75K words.  I’m excited to have reached the end, but there’s a sense of sadness that comes with the completion of this writing phase.  No more jotting down fresh ideas for the story on the train, in between meetings at work, or via e-mails to myself.  Permission to write whatever I want has been officially withdrawn.  It’s on to the editing phase where hours (days sometimes) worth of work will be mercilessly annihilated with the stroke of a delete button; weakly-executed through-lines will test my faith; and there’ll be no quick fixes for areas of contrived plotting, character inconsistencies and cringe-worthy passages.

Yes, I’m being a bit of a drama queen about this.  But I’ve been through editing a novel manuscript before (THE REGISTRATION) and it was pretty horrific.  So maybe it’s like rounds of chemotherapy, getting easier each time.  Maybe it’s all in the right attitude.  I will be approaching my edits differently, taking the advice of writing guru Jack Bickham.  I’m setting the manuscript aside for a couple of weeks.  The idea is to let the brain cells regenerate and new ideas emerge.

In the meantime, I’ll be turning back to some of my short fiction projects.  I recently posted IN A WINE PHASE on gayauthors.org, a fantastic on-line writer’s community.  I’m continuing to look for a home for MIKE’S POND.  Maybe I’ll even churn out a new story during this break.

Oh – and why the pic of Robert Verdi?  I love his new show!!

Weekly Progress Report

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I decided that Wednesdays are the best day to write a weekly progress report.  It’ll keep me focused on my writing goals at a time when work and personal life demands are compounding, hold me accountable, and create a mechanism for charting my progress.  Plus these progress posts are pretty easy to write even in the midst of “everything.”

So I’m a little less than halfway through a third read and “light” edit of WHEN THE FALLEN ANGELS FLY.  This is what I do:  write a big novel chunk then pore over it until I can live with moving on with the story.  I wrote 45,000 words of the novel from July to September, and I figure I’m about two-thirds to the end.  Right now, I’m re-reading the part where my protagonist Richard Carroll confronts a second assignment in his training to become an angel.  The re-read/edit is pretty tedious.  I’m hoping to get to the end of my draft in two weeks.  Then, it’ll be a lot more fun writing the last third of Richard’s story.

Quixotic publishing news and non-updates:  Believe it or not, The Paris Review rejected my short story THE TROUBLE WITH FINKLESTEINS.  So maybe submitting there was a little unrealistic, but I couldn’t help myself.  Now I go to Duotrope Digest and find a better publishing match.  Two of my pieces are out on submission:  CROTCHWATCHERS at Nighttrain and MIKE’S POND at Crazyhorse.  I should get verdicts in about a month.

I just sent THE REGISTRATION to the wonderful author Eric Mays.  We connected through the Facebook group LGBTI Writers and Allies and struck up a correspondence.   It’s been really great talking to someone with experience in the biz.  I haven’t tinkered with THE REGISTRATION or had it read for about six months so it’ll be nice to get a new perspective.

Last, I added a link in the spirit of my on-going OPERATION:  OPTIMIZE.  GayWisdom.org maintains a gay history archive, and you can subscribe to their free listserv and receive a daily e-mail telling you about significant events, biographies and quotes from gays past and present.  I’m thinking this will be an awesome source of inspiration for my writing.