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The first thing I've found is that the process takes a lot longer than I expected. When I wrote the first draft, my goal was to get the story out of my head as fast as I could and not worry about writing the perfect sentence—that is, assuming I am actually capable of writing something approaching the perfect sentence. Now that I'm editing, my goal is to write those perfect sentences, and I am coming to understand the agony of sweating out every single word.

While writing the first draft I thought I could stare at a blank page for a long time. It turns out, I can stare at a page with words on it even longer. I've been working on it for two weeks and I've only revised two scenes. If I continue at this pace, it will never be finished. But I don't want to rush through any of it. I really do want every sentence to be as good as possible. If it takes years, then so be it. The best part is that I'm truly enjoying the process. That may change after editing a hundred scenes though.

Another complication I've encountered is tracking progress. While I wrote the first draft, I could easily track my word count. With editing, the smallest unit of progress I can track is a whole scene. So if I run out of writing time and I've revised less than one scene—which is common—I come away feeling like a loafer—which I kind of am.

I refuse to allow my slacker tendencies to derail this dream.

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First things first—I'm going to take some time away from the manuscript (calling it a manuscript makes it sound more impressive—you may use that trick). I think I'll be able to read it more critically if I'm not so close to it. I find if I read something I've just written, I can't see any other way to write it. I'm hoping to avoid that.

During that time off—probably a month or two—I think I'll do some reading on the craft of writing. I'm looking at Elements of Fiction Writing - Description by Monica Wood and Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting by Syd Field. While I'm doing that, I still need to be writing so I'm going to work on a short story and see how that goes.

At the beginning of 2009 I made it a goal to write one chapter of a novel. That goal was neglected and forgotten until July when I found the story idea I had been looking for. For years, I've kept a list of story ideas as well as notes on the ideas. The idea that eventually became the story I've written was developed over a month of note taking. It changed drastically from day to day until it finally got to the point where I started writing. And once I started writing, the story just kept coming. My worries that I would be unable to get past 10,000 words and 20,000 words faded as I found myself at 40,000 words, 50,000 words, and beyond.

As I got used to the writing process, I found what worked best for me was getting the story out as quickly as possible—not worrying about writing the perfect prose. Once I started doing that, the words came much more easily. We'll see how I feel about it when I start editing. Vonnegut mentions this method of writing as well as the inverse method in Timequake.

Tellers of stories with ink on paper, not that they matter anymore, have been either swoopers or bashers. Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn't work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they're done they're done.

We won't talk about the next paragraph where he mentions that most men are bashers and most women are swoopers.

I'm excited to begin editing. It will be my first experience with editing a work of this length. I expect it will take as long or longer to edit than it did to write. I'm also feeling some measure of dread at the prospect of going back and reading the draft. I worry it will be so bad I will be scarred for life from the horror of beholding it. I don't think it's quite that bad, but you know how it is when you read your own work, it's like trying to judge your children's athletic ability or intelligence—of course they're the best athlete/smarted kid in the world.

I've been neglecting this site while I was working on the first draft—at least that was my excuse. I don't have that excuse now, so I'm hoping to have more frequent posts. If my past record is any indication, more frequent posts are unlikely. People who can generate a high quantity of content and make it interesting and/or useful are amazing to me. Anyone can vomit out gobs of boring self-indulgent drivel—even me. If I work hard at it, perhaps it's a skill I can develop like an exercised muscle. And if I'm the only one who reads no one will get hurt either way.

Cheers.

Photo by L. Marie

Sometime early in high school my dad gave me Citizen of the Galaxy and Starman Jones by Robert Heinlein.  I was hooked on science-fiction immediately.  I’ll read almost any genre if I’m in the right mood, but for the last twenty years, my one true love has been science-fiction.

I’ve had the urge to write for most of that time, but other interests and a decided lack of ability in that area pushed it out of my mind.  In the 10 years since college, the urge has returned.  And over the last five years has intensified.  Added to that is a growing distaste for office life and working for a company.  So I’ve decided to do something about it and begin writing a novel—science-fiction, of course.

I’ve been taking notes on four or five story ideas for the past few years.  I never got to the point where I would actually write anything other than notes.  They are all good ideas for stories, but one in particular generated far more notes than the others.  I would find myself thinking about it several times a day.

Certain events over the past few years have led me to the conclusion that I needed to begin the process of extracting myself from the mainstream IT and business world.  I came to a point in my life where I needed to fully commit to application development in order to stay current with the constantly changing technology scene or branch off into something else.  I had already decided that management was not the path for me.

All these things led to the decision that it was time for me to take action and work towards a career in writing science-fiction.  So this spring I became one of the many unpublished authors.  At this time I have finished three chapters and by word-count about 10% of the novel.

I’ll be posting anything interesting I encounter while I work on the novel.  I’ll also post articles or excerpts from books I read that I think will be useful to other writers.  There’s a good chance I’ll post idiotic or funny stuff I find as well.  My hope is to build a decent following so that if a miracle occurs and I get published, I’ll have a few dozen fans willing to buy it right away.  Sounds likely, right?

I’d to post semi-regularly, whatever that means, and I will do my best to make the posts interesting and keep them under 500 words.  No promises though.

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If you’re here for one of the programming articles I wrote for the old blog, I’m sorry to say, they are gone.  There was only one that people seemed interested in.  So if you really need to know how to search for a value in all of the tables of a SQL Server database, send me an email and I’ll get you the information.