Tag Archives: writing progress

Rewrite blues

Posted on by
2

So I resolved to post a progress report on my writing projects every Wednesday.  This one barely makes deadline at 11:38PM EST.  I have an excuse.  I came down with a pretty bad head cold last week and am still getting back up to 100%.  I’ve got my box of tissues stationed by the keyboard.

My manuscript is up to 49.6K words / 194 pages.  That may sound like decent progress but here’s the thing.  I reached a scene where Richard’s relationship with his angel mentor Rafi takes a critical turn, and it just didn’t read right.  I realized I needed to go back and evaluate previous scenes between the two guys.  My diagnosis:  more rewiting and finetuning.  I’m trying to really get into Richard’s head.  Kind of frustrating since I thought I knew the guy after almost five months of “living” with him and charting out his life.  Oh well.  It’s part of the process.  This set me back about 50 pages so I’m actually further from the end of my manuscript than I was last week.

But hopefully the story is getting stronger.  Next week, I have two full days to devote to writing.  I’m hoping my pre-Thanksgiving post will be full of optimism.  Right now, Richard is once again immersing himself in psychology texts to figure out how to think like a psychotherapist.  But he’s not whiny.

Weekly Progress Report

Posted on by
2

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.