To the folks in Florida’s Panhandle and places which will be impacted by Hurricane Michael…
At this hour, the storm is quickly approaching land and seeing the images on my TV of the heavy waves hitting those beaches and the beginnings of the storm surge fill me with incredible dread.
Please be careful out there, people. If you can still do so, evacuate.
I can’t help but also dread what the news will show us tomorrow.
Short and to the point: The latest revisions of Draft Nine of Book #7 in the Corrosive Knights series are going along great.
When last I wrote about what was happening with this book, I noted I was done with the read-through and pen & ink revisions and was about to start transferring those revisions into my Word file. I estimated it might take two weeks to do those revisions.
Well, it looks like a little less than one week will be enough. I’m not quite done with it now, but I should be finished with the computer transfers of those revisions by later this week, perhaps Thursday evening or Friday morning.
This is a scorching pace but, even more importantly, it shows how close the novel is to being done.
There remains a couple of sections which required more work this time around, but there were also several sections that wound up needing very little work and which are, for all intents and purposes, ready to go.
So I’m damn excited about what’s going on. So excited it took me a while to get to sleep last night… After all this time, the light at the end of this particular tunnel is starting to shine very bright!
We’re in early October and though I did quite a few movie monsters, there are plenty of creepy and kooky, mysterious and spooky, and altogether ooky subjects to take on…
Here then are John Astin and Carolyn Jones as Gomez and Morticia Addams…
Yesterday I posted that I was finished reading and pen/ink revising through my latest novel, the 9th draft of the book, and was looking forward to putting those revisions into the computer.
Last night, I slept really hard.
Lights out and goodbye.
Though it may not seem the case, writing is a very stressful, time consuming job. Job as in work.
I’ve stated it before but it bears repeating: Writing is WORK. At times very, very hard work.
I started this latest book in the Corrosive Knights series, believe it or not, waaaaaay back in 2014. I wrote some notes and sequences, amounting to maybe 10,000-15,000 words, then let it go while working on, among other things, Foundry of the Gods (Book #6 of the Corrosive Knights series).
When Foundry of the Gods was finished, it was back to Book #7, the conclusion to the Corrosive Knights series, and for nearly two years now I’ve been working on it and, incrementally, brought it closer and closer to its conclusion.
The first 4-5 drafts of the book were very incomplete, as most of my novels are in those early drafts. There are some segments that I have well thought out and write. There are other segments that may be presented as nothing more than an outline. Perhaps no more than one or two sentences!
Which brings us to the heading above: Persistence.
With each read-through, with each putting revisions into the computer, I move the proverbial ball forward. Sometimes the ball “moves” many miles forward. At other times, perhaps it doesn’t move forward nearly enough.
With each revision and if I’m paying attention -and, trust me, I try my very best to do so- the novel slowly emerges.
There are “a-ha!” moments, where you come up with some clever bit or sequence or dialogue that improves everything around it. But more often than not what you’re doing is realizing this doesn’t work or that sentence is bloated or that sequence is a repetition of a sequence that came before.
Rather than simply cracking open your cranium and letting your thoughts spill all over the page, what I tend to do as a writer is incrementally build my book over time. I’ve mentioned before that when I’m writing, a day doesn’t pass where I’m not thinking about some part of a book I’m currently on and how do I improve this or that.
This goes on for, on average of late, two full years as I write my latest work.
For some writers, the process is certainly quicker. Stephen King, as I’ve noted before, stated in his book on writing that he will write a book, put it away in a drawer (to, as he put it, “cool down”), then do a revision and off it goes to be printed. If he’s to be believed, that means his first run through a novel is very close to what he eventually releases.
I’m jealous!
Clearly what works for me may not work for others. I suspect if Mr. King took two full years to write a novel he might have given up the career.
But for me, as much of a pain in the ass as it is to so slowly, incrementally create a book, the fact of the matter is that this is how it works for me, and when I get to the end of this particular road I look back at all that hard work and the persistence needed to create it…
…and I’m proud of the work. So very proud.
And I finally, finally get to have a good night’s sleep! 😉
As I mentioned in my last posting, I’ve been silent ’round these parts because I’ve been hard at work reading and pen/ink revising the latest draft, #9, of my latest Corrosive Knights novel…
As of today, I have finished the read-through and pen/ink revisions of this draft and, hopefully, by tomorrow or later today, being putting those revisions into my computer.
When I do, Draft #9 of Book #7 in this series will be completed and its off to Draft #10.
So, how does the book “read”?
Quite good.
There was very little I needed to add to the story. What I did add amounted to some lines of dialogue and clarification to some descriptions but, otherwise, the plot is pretty well locked down.
The best thing of all was that it took me from last week Tuesday, the 25th of September, to today, October 4th, to read through the novel and write up my revisions. That’s one week and two days worth of work, a very short amount of time given that in earlier drafts it would take me up to several months of time to get to a similar point!
The revisions that are to be made should, I believe, take me no more than two weeks to do. They are for the most part small though there are two segments of the book that require more in depth work, and these will certainly require a little more time to do.
The big question again looms: How long before I feel the whole thing is done?
Well, the book will require a 10th draft, there is no doubt about that. It will likely also require an 11th draft. The question is will it require much more than that? Will I once again go through 12 drafts before I feel the work is properly done?
Unfortunately, at this point I cannot answer that question, though I’ll likely have a better feel for how much more work the book needs once I start the read through of that 10th draft.
Regardless of all that, the work proceeds quickly now and the book is one more step closer to being done.
As I’ve said before and I’ll repeat here: Hang in there. We’re almost at the finish line!
There are many films I’ve seen and covered here. Of them, I consider the subject of this piece, the 1977 Charles Bronson film The White Buffalo, one of the strangest, most bizarre films I’ve ever seen.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing!
You can be forgiven if you’ve neither heard of or seen it. I don’t believe it was terribly successful upon its release.
The movie’s plot is an odd variation of Moby Dick and Jaws (which was released two years earlier) but transplanted to the Wild West. Bronson plays Wild Bill Hickok, a man who returns to an area where he is very much not wanted because of recurring nightmares he’s having involving a white buffalo. He is forced to use an alias because there are many there who want him dead. Hickok eventually teams up with Crazy Horse, who is also using an alias. He will only regain his “true” name when he gets revenge upon that very same white buffalo which killed his wife and child.
The special effects of the film, especially the final stand against the beast, are often ridiculed because they look so unreal, but having seen the film following its BluRay release, I suspect the effects were very much intended to be that way. They create a sense of these characters caught in a surreal dreamscape and, in that respect, they work.
Well, at least for me.
