Timewaster's Guide Archive

Woot. 

Kris and I have also finally created a website for our ramblings and excerpts and blog and stuff:

realitybypass.8m.com

Feels so official like.  Now if only the publisher will write back.

Heh...it's fun to look back, and to look forward to many more years gaming up a storm.  I think as folks get older we either embrace the geek or hide it.  I'm much happier doing the former.

I can adjust to Thursday, but I teach piano lessons from 6-7, 7:30ish that night.  That'd be my only concern.

There are a lot of great resources talking about editing that you can look into.  Stephen King's book On Writing is excellent.  Anne Lamont's Bird by Bird as well.

Other suggestions:

Read outloud.  If it's hard to read and you stumble over long passages or repeat the same words over and over, start rewording and chopping stuff away.

Consider all adverbs and whether they serve a purpose/move the sentence along.  If you can get 'spoke loudly' from the fact there's an exclamation point at the end of the sentence then kill the adverb, etc.  Not all adverbs are evil, but they tend to be a crutch for writing that doesn't need them.

Turn on your spellchecker!  Like a bunch of folks here I edited for The Leading Edge, and it was STUNNING how many manuscripts we received that had basic words misspelled.  Silly things like 'teh' instead of 'the' which a spellchecker would have caught.  If you don't have a spellchecker there are plenty of them online, cut and paste your documents in and fix those basic words.

Get involved with a writer's group or hand the manuscript over to others to read.  The caution here is that you can't give it to someone who will just tell you it's wonderful because they love you.  You have to get objective readers that will tell you what they like and where they'd draw the red line and stop reading.  Send to a variety of people of both genders.  I've found that men and women read things very differently, and stuff that I would have cut based on input from my female readers are beloved sections by the male readers.  Get lots of input and look for the middle ground so that you can continue to appeal to a wide audience.

Keep writing.

Keep writing some more.

And then keep writing some more.

It'll be another long break after next week, since the week after that is the 26th.  So that'd be ideal for us.  We can give another big chunk to be read over the Christmas holiday.  Shrain on the 19th and K and I on the 2nd of January.

Sorry to miss last night, but party was good and bonus better. 

*pokies*  So Shrain, we getting stuff this week for Wednesday?

Extra readers is always a good thing.  Just make sure we have your email addy.

YAY for Oddsbreaker. 

There is a chance that I won't make group this week because it's go live week at work for our big software push.  I will TRY, but may be on from work.  Worst case I'll still mail comments.

~J

I remember reading these some time ago, and then stumbled on my print out again the other day and thought they were well worth the share:

Kurt Vonnegut

Eight rules for writing fiction:

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.

2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.

3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.

4. Every sentence must do one of two things -- reveal character or advance the action.

5. Start as close to the end as possible.

6. Be a sadist. Now matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them -- in order that the reader may see what they are made of.

7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

-- Vonnegut, Kurt Vonnegut, Bagombo Snuff Box: Uncollected Short Fiction (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons 1999), 9-10.