17 Feb 21 This page provides status updates and comments as I continue to write Crowfood and Shilo. Entries will fall anywhere on the scale between being specific to these two works and being generic about a wide range of aspects of writing.
26 Feb 21 I’ve just edited a bunch of stuff out of this journal because it was related to creating this website, not the writing process. However, it is noteworthy that ancillary things (marketing, for example) can have a dramatic effect on the progress—primarily by stealing productive time. That has been the case with me as I’ve been developing these Internet pages.
Shilo is really annoyed. She says I’m neglecting her. That's a fair cop. I’m coming, Shilo! Don't worry. But first I just need to tweak the alignment and get the "Contact" link working, adjust the skew, friggle the fraggle and...
No! I mean it, Shilo. I'll be right there.
8 Mar 21 Considering chapters: When I read in the evenings, and the time comes to sleep, I thumb a page or two ahead to see if there is a chapter I can reach before putting the book down for the night. When writing I try to end a chapter meeting two opposed conditions: One-it’s a good place to pause for a while and, Two-I want the reader to want to continue. At a chapter’s end I’d like the reader to think, I can’t stop here. What’s next?
Crowfood is only 22 chapters long. Shilo is 67 and will exceed 90 before I finish. Shilo is a longer work but its chapters are shorter—about half the length of those in Crowfood. I’ve asked beta readers—none has expressed concern about the length of Crowfood’s chapters. Is my unease ado about nothing? Writing the small suspense at the end of each chapter is useful. The physical break—injection of white space, a turned page and chapter headings—enhance, sometimes even create, suspense that wouldn’t be there otherwise.
9 Mar 21 Some kind of introduction is in order. Reading this journal without knowing my perspective leaves out some useful information, I suppose. So, here it goes:
Shilo and Crowfood are my first books—not counting a half-score of starts, some of which I will continue, and not counting that one which has been collecting dust for uhum years.
I’ve read where some say the best preparation to become a writer is to do a lot of reading. I disagree. I believe reading and writing are two different skill sets. I have read a lot, I’m on step one as a writer.
I started Crowfood and Shilo with no creative writing education or training. Here’s the reason:
I figure that I’ll only have one opportunity to write something without the restrictions of—for lack of a better expression—doing it the right way. Before too much longer (unavoidably, it has already begin) I expect my head to be filled with—it’s best to do this; your structure should be that; the proper form is—you get the idea. That kind of thing will unavoidable influence my future work—I’ve only got one chance to create something unencumbered by such gnawing little voices. That is why I’m scribbling out my first books without the benefit of learning how to write. I have found a lot of drawbacks to doing it this way, which I may address in future entries.
I do want to note one advantage: I’ve discovered some of my weaknesses on my own. That makes a bigger impression than reading a warning about it in a how-to book or hearing a professor make the point in front of a class. Were I to read or hear such guidance now I’d say, ‘Oh yeah. I get that. I’ve experienced it myself.’ And sometimes, ‘At least I don’t have that problem.’
7 Apr 21 SPOILER ALERT—Today’s entry includes a discussion of characters and situations in Shilo.
Shilo, the protagonist of Shilo, threw two plot twists at me. It is challenging when your character does something unplanned. While I’m always free to write the action out of her, I generally like the things she does that take me by surprise. But it also means everything about the book going forward needs to be tweaked to take into account her unexpected actions.
The first of the two twists was that she fell in love with a character that was intended to be a one-or-two date thing—but here we are, chapters later, and she’s very serious about David—they’re talking about a life together. (I call him David because that’s his name—currently. I’ll probably change it—it’s pretty conventional compared to most of the names I’ve used.) This romance is a problem. Very soon, the timeline of Shilo will meet the timeline of Crowfood. Early in Crowfood Shilo has a romantic interest in another man, Calvin. So, the question is, what happens between Shilo and David—who are so in love—that ends up with Shilo in another man’s arms some months later?
Now, to be clear—this isn’t a question of ‘how could it happen’—it does happen, spoiler alert—even in real life. I jotted down possibilities, and came up with nine of them in five minutes. The issues are: Which is right for the story, the writer (me), Shilo, David and Calvin; and then the need to write that choice into the story as it moves forward. That need, to incorporate the shifting or splitting of Shilo’s affection, was not one I had to think about before Shilo went and fell in love with David—very inconsiderate of her, making my work harder.
Just for your fun—here’s the list:
(a) He goes on a mission—researching dragons etc.—(see army contract) — and isn’t heard from again (until Kiudileaen’s Quest?) (But what would keep Shilo from looking for him?)
(b) The gloss leaves and they break up —maybe most “real”
(c) They can’t handle the separation of her deployment; Shilo’s split military/David commitments are too much for them
(d) David gives her his blessing to meet her needs
(e) She has to meet her needs—Despite still intending to return to David (what happens on the road stays on the road.)—Lots of Guilt potential
(f) Calvin “steals” her affection (but I don’t see him as outshining David—though he might objectively be a better “catch”)
(g) Somehow, David is drawn back to Clair
(h) Something happens to David? (I’d hate to hurt poor David, but sometimes you got to do what you got to do.)
The second unexpected thing was that Shilo, at a point, is literally (yes, literally) knocked down by the sudden realization that she is thinking of the flood of new army recruits that she’s training as inconveniences. She’s created a mental block that has kept her from seeing all the ‘newbies’ as individuals, as people.
In this case it helps the storyline directly. I had a note—‘?? How does Shilo go through phases to become the consummate loyal warrior while still being compassionate and a war skeptic?’ In this instance, without the writer planning it, Shilo has a revelation that fits in perfectly with the intended story development.
At the point when this revelation occurs Shilo is happy and content with everything, except her job—training army newcomers. This occurred while I was writing last night—it will be interesting to see how it impacts her attitude toward her professional training responsibilities and if it bleeds over and disrupts her otherwise settled personal life.
So, that’s a little commentary on how a character’s unexpected actions impacted her story’s development.
11 Apr 21 Before I mentioned the (possible) value of discovering issues on your own instead of having them pointed out to you. I’m going to touch on a mistake I made with Crowfood. This is a case of something obvious in hindsight that I almost certainly wouldn’t have made if I’d studied the fundamentals of creative writing.
As I came near the close of Crowfood, I found a blaring discrepancy. Adding up the duration of my chapters, I discovered that the story was about a year long. However, it started in late spring and ended in early autumn. I did have options to ‘get around’ this—one being that Idruz is not our world, therefore I could declare a year to be a thousand days long and be done with it. Or, since it was primarily about weather, with a little effort I could have said it was set in a temperate climate.
However, I wanted both the weather extremes of Midwest America and the readers’ comfort with a ‘year’ being a year.* The result was the need to do a lot of rewriting, beginning with starting the story in early spring instead of late spring, and adjusting many scenes to be in the winter.
It’s amazing how many ways consistency must and should be monitored. Beginning with the height, eye color, hair length and color and silkiness etc. of each character. But not just the human characters, the horse too, as well as climbing tree outside the front door — it can’t have a long, straight trunk in one scene and be the easiest tree in the world to climb in the next. And you can’t stick yourself on its needles in one scene and rest in the shade of its Oak leaves twenty chapters later.
In my case, the actual and relative sizes of made-up things had to be carefully cataloged. One can’t be staring into a giant’s knee at one point, and climbing the mountain that is his big toe at another. And, I found I was giving clues to readers about the size of things by comparing them to a tree—did you know trees come in an abundance of sizes? There is evidence out there that I did not. A giant who’s head is brushing the redwood canopy is a lot bigger than on who’s head is entangled in the canopy of a grove of Crape Myrtle (which I’m told is a small tree).
I think in my next adventure I’ll be keeping a parallel document with a copy of every description I give of everything for reference. And, let us not forget, description and consistency sould include things like a person’s habits and nature. If you like him because he’s very calm, but his constant blinking is annoying—and you see him ten more times and he’s always mad and you never mention his blinking, then there ought to be some explanation.
* A future topic will be deciding to use or discard standard, understood things in your fantasy world. Are the months Jan, Feb Mar? Is the week seven days of Mon, Tue, Wed? Hint: It may not be logical to stick with the common, but it will save a lot of writing if you use things already understood. (In my world, for example, just getting across that the work week is six days and the ‘weekend’ is only Sunday can get tiresome. And it’s never called a weekend—because most readers know a ‘weekend’ is two days.)
15 Apr 21 On the evolution of sentences. I proofed the following:
There was an element in command and in the queen’s halls that just saw wizards as blunt weapons and didn’t think there was any need for them to be involved in reviewing intelligence or planning military actions.
On first reading I took out the “there was/that” which both removed extra words and switched the sentence from passive to active. I also changed “command” to “army command” — the element wasn’t in command, it was inside the thing “army command”—so that clarified.
On further consideration—
"Element" was too cold
Second “in”: unnecessary
Queen’s Halls: is the proper name of a group of buildings—capitalize
just: unnecessary
…think there was any…: wordy, unnecessary
So, we go from this:
There was an element in command and in the queen’s halls that just saw wizards as blunt weapons and didn’t think there was any need for them to be involved in reviewing intelligence or planning military actions.
To this:
A clique in army command and the Queen’s Halls saw wizards as blunt weapons that didn’t need to be involved in reviewing intelligence or planning military actions. (Note: ...saw wizards as blunt weapons who didn't need... or ...saw wizards as blunt weapons that didn't need... First I changed "that" to "who"--because wizards are people. However, I changed it back, ...seeing wizards as 'blunt weapons that didn't need...)
Here’s another, which is more about what I decided to leave in:
Shilo signaled Leena and they moved a couple chairs to what they hoped would a close, but not threatening, distance.
Shilo signaled Leena and they moved chairs closer, but kept what they hoped was a non-threatening distance.
Changes and considered changes:
“couple” was unnecessary
Considered: “Shilo signaled Leena and they moved” to “Shilo and Leena moved”. However, that lost the idea that Leena was stunned, sort of frozen in place and needed Shilo to get her moving.
Considered: “…kept what they hoped was a non-threatening…” to “…kept a non-threatening…” However, I didn’t make this change because Shilo and Leena are uncertain what will spook the fairies. It is important to keep the point that they don’t know what might scare away the fays.
Changed: The extract ‘hoped would be a close’ was probably clear in context. But they weren’t “hoping the chairs would be close”—they were hoping the final position of the chairs would be non-threatening. So we move hope away from “close”, and next to “non-threatening”.
One has to question the value of this sort of micro-editing of every sentence. And indeed, I wouldn’t do it with every sentence. But sometimes, to me, it feels called-for. If I identify a sentence as sloppy, I can’t, then, leave it as it is to save time.
And let me say, just because things can be removed, doesn’t mean they should be. Even if I can take words out, and preserve the meaning, I would not do it every time. I’m not sure I can put into words exactly why I’d keep some—it’d have to be something to do with the rhythm and flow of the sentence. Also, sometimes ‘doesn’t change the meaning’ ignores slight nuances I might want. I absolutely don’t want to leave the impression everything unnecessary ought to be removed.
Paragraphs and entire books can be improved in ways analogous to the sentence changes above—adding, subtracting and modifying sentences and paragraphs. The first example shows a notable reduction in word count. Crowfood was 120,000 words when the first draft was finished. It dropped to 110,000 after a couple read-through edit sessions. It is painful to throw away so much work, and so many hours of effort. However, I do think it improved the manuscript—part of the price one pays for having a better finished product, I suppose.
19 Apr 21 By way of a brief example, let’s examine what it means to define, or redefine, some terminology of a fictional world after the manuscript is finished, or mostly finished.
Recently, with Crowfood in editing phase and the first draft of Shilo about 80% complete, I decided I had to have a better defined calendar system. I used, and continue to use, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday… For months I had been using: first moon, eighth moon, and the like. These were not the names of months—rather a count of how many full moons had occurred since the first of the year (which starts on a full moon, by definition). Arbitrarily, and for the convenience of the reader, there are twelve months in most years, and if you add the passage of time—days and weeks—in Crowfood or Shilo you’ll find that months last about the same as “our” world. In Idruz a moon phase is equal to a month—each full moon is the first of a month. (Note: Idruz has two moons—the calendar is kept by the yellow moon. This will be more explicit after editing.)
I don’t wish to get into too much detail here, but here are the first months’ names in the new terminology:
Winter Moon—also known as—Firstmoon
Secondmoon
Thirdmoon
Spring Moon
Fifthmoon
Sixthmoon
Summer Moon
Fouryearmoon*
Eighthmoon
Etc…
* Fouryearmoon is a month added every four years to keep the moon phases in sync with weather patterns—i.e. years. It’s basically a leap day—except it’s a leap month. Because it’s a fictional world, the amount of compensation necessary is arbitrary (both the length of a year and the time for the moon to cycle are up to me)—I’ve just elected to say an extra month every four years does the trick ("usually", I believe is the way I put it).
This has two effects on editing:
1: I’ll need to edit both books to change terminology to match the new standards.
2: I’ll need to carefully make sure the grammar is done correctly. Already, in proofing, I inked in the exact erroneous change I have cautioned myself about. Below is regarding this point:
Perviously: twentieth day of the fourth moon
Now: twentieth of Spring Moon; or twentieth day of Spring Moon
Not: twentieth day of the Spring Moon. That would be analagous to saying: twentieth day of the October
23 Apr 21 The curse of randomly inserted potential plot thread beginnings.
That’s a mouthful. What we’re talking about here is when one is writing along, and inserts something in the manuscript that suggests there should, or could, be follow-up and future reference to that point. The question, which I don’t have an answer for, is how much of an obligation this puts on the writer to refer back to it later?
At the moment one case is on my mind. I may follow up with more examples later, as I come across them. I’m fairly certain there are many.
In this case Shilo has received a letter from her boyfriend. They will not be able to communicate with each other again for an unknown amount of time. He has said to her, ‘I’ll think of you at seven o’clock every morning and evening, think of me at the same time and we’ll know we’re thinking of each other together.’
Things happen, days pass, and not once did I write about Shilo thinking of this boyfriend at seven o’clock. In this example, It’s clear that I’ve got to add a follow-up, it was sloppy to just ignore it. Granted, the follow-up might be she does as he asks every day, or she’s too busy, or she does it sometimes, or even she doesn’t bother because it seems silly or pointless. But it is in a dramatic letter from the man she loves, so at a minimum she should at least think of it now and then.
Is it sometimes okay that a possible starting point—something that leaves a broad possibility for future follow-up—does, in the end, get no further reference? This is realistic—but perhaps, in the context of a novel, one should edit out lines that tease a follow-up but provide none?
27 Apr 21 On the 11 April entry above I talked of discovering an error made—the issue was that I’d wrote a year’s action, but the seasons had only changed from spring to fall. An equally serious lapse was pointed out to me by a beta reader—I probably would never have noticed on my own, and only one of a handful of beta readers saw it. Yet, like the 11 April entry, it was obvious once exposed. I’m meandering—here’s what happened:
A beta reader pointed out to me that I described a fight involving dragons before I described the dragons. She explained that she had this image of the battle, but when she read, later, the description of dragons, it invalidated the image she’d formed.
(Little Spoiler Alert): One root of the problem, here, is that “my” dragons are not conventional dragons. The beta reader imagined standard dragons—thus the fight she imagined around my words was very different from the one I was writing about.
Here are 3+1 takeaways from this:
1: You need to introduce your elements, with adequate description, before the action. I did, in fact, introduce dragons in the first line of the book and with some description. But I neglected to fill in details that differentiated them from classical dragons—thus the reader gets a poor intro and is open to having a confusing first action sequence that must be re-imagined after reading later material. I did this again with a character in Shilo. I introduced the character who, at the time, I though was going to be a one-page side. However, she turned into one of Shilo’s closest friends and kept appearing in chapter after chapter. Just the other day I realized that I had no idea what she looked like. I looked back at her first appearance, and all I mentioned was her age. So, a bit of reworking necessary to fill in Leena’s image.
2: Not all people read the same. I truly don’t create images in my mind when I read, not much. Yet when I write it comes almost straight from a mental image. For me, then, I must pay extra attention to writing for those who form a real mental picture as they move the words from the page to their mind. Another example is my original introduction to Shilo in Shilo. I had her doing all this action, behaving a certain way, with certain personality characteristics—a beta reader told me, ‘you have to give her age sooner’—they, rightly with what I’d given them, could visualize the character as anywhere from eight to eighteen.
3: One of the hardest things I’ve found, for me, is to write as though the reader doesn’t have an existing knowledge of the world and the story. After writing and proofing the manuscript four or five times, and creating the story from imagined scenes and images, it is very hard to have the perspective of someone who knows nothing except the words that have preceded the ones they are currently reading. This feels so major and important to get across, I want to expound on it, but it is a simple, critical point: The reader does not have the benefit of knowing what you’ve imagined in a scene or the ‘big picture framework” of the world you’ve already created and know well.
+1: My next topic is related. It regards the limits of “painting” a scene with words.
1 May 21
A warm breeze
Stirs autumn leaves
In moonlight
The novel writer must balance the number of words in a passage against the pace of the novel and the utility of the detail. They can never create in the reader’s eye every nuance of what they can potentially imagine.
Consider the description of a wagon. First thing is to narrow it down—wagon is too broad, so you’d enter the word buckboard into the passage, to differentiate it from a carriage, cart, radio flyer, and so many others. Is it painted—what color—flaking paint? Unpainted old, dry gray wood? What’s the seating for the driver (bench?) Is the iron hardware holding it together rusty? How high does the wagon ride from the ground? What’s pulling it? How much does it rattle? And on and on…
It’d be a rare passage where the author wishes to describe a wagon in as much detail as listed above. So the writer must find the balance. Reference back to my note in the previous entry about the character Leena, who I introduced without describing—this is an obvious error of under—description. How can a character appear a dozen times when the writer hasn’t told a thing about what they look like? (In Leena’s case, I think the only thing I said of her was that she was some years older than Shilo. Of course, the final version won’t reflect this, as I will fix this by filling in some details during editing.)
Since I started wordsmithing my novels my respect for poetry has grown. A poem, like the one above, due to its length if nothing else, clearly announces that it’s your mind’s eye that is to create this scene—the writer isn’t going to hold your hand. In a way it is more personal, because the autumn leaves you see are your image of autumn leaves, the warm breeze you feel comes completely from you. If the poem talked of the red, yellow and orange of autumn leaves in the light of a quarter moon on a cloudy evening that’d be perfectly valid too—but it’d be a different poem. The writer decides how much to give, and how much you must draw.
Now, there are two something-like-errors in this eight word poem. (1) by Autumn Leaves the author wants you to imaging orange and yellow and red and green leaves—why else “autumn” leaves—but colors don’t show so well in moonlight (2) Autumn breezes usually aren’t warm breezes. You could stretch this, it could be a rare, warm, fall breeze. But if the reader has to step away and ask, ‘warm breeze in autumn—does that make sense?’—then they’re out of the mood.
I like a warm breeze, I like leaves stirring in any breeze, I like colorful autumn leaves, and I like moonlight. I would like all these things at one time—but the contradictions should send a caution sign to a novelist. Are they acceptable in poetry? I don’t know, but if forced my answer to that would be a simple: “Did you like the poem?”
5 May 21 The decision, in fantasy and non-earthly settings, to use conventional frames of reference and terminology or create unique ones from scratch can be daunting and add unexpected complexity. In my simplistic vision, there are, fundamentally, three options—use terms and frames of reference as we conventionally use them—i.e. just like today’s world i.e. just like non-fiction. A second option is for the writer to make up their own words. The final choice is to use an existing word, but redefine it.
By conventional, I mean things like 24 hours in a day, Jan, Feb, Mar; Mon, Tue, Wed; Mile; Pound; and so forth. Also, things people have a general idea of—dragon, fairy, rocket, and the like. I would say this is the easiest for both writer and reader. Building a new term or relationship from scratch requires extra work.
Choices made for Crowfood and Shilo reflect these options:
Fairies and Pixies: The fairies and pixies in Idruz are similar to a standard image that would come to mind for many of us. The image is refined, which turns them into the fairies and pixies of the world of Idruz. Having the reader start with a conventional image and building from that worked in this case. Since the classic image of fairies and pixies is more-or-less the same, I had some fun developing how they are different from each other and how they relate to each other in my fictional world.
Tesoqu and Onok: These two types of giants started out as trolls and orcs. This presented a two-fold problem for me. Trolls and orcs are not as well defined as fairies and pixies. And, secondly, as far as they are understood entities, they did not match my giants very well. Unlike “building” fairies and pixies from a base, using Troll and Orc would require first tearing down any pre-existing image the reader might have, then building a new one. So, I decided to drop the Troll/Orc terms and make up my own—thus came Tesoqu and Onok. Tesoqu was a random selection, Onok grabbed letters from “stone” and “rock”.
Making up words brings some mechanical issues into play. For example, I decide that the plural of Tesoqu was Tesoqu and the plural of Onok was Onoks.
Dragons: By the logic of Tesoque/Onok/Trolls and Orks—the beasts in Crowfood and Shilo should not be called dragons—they are far from the traditional image of a dragon. However, in this case the intention from the start was to poke a little fun at the conventional image. I won’t put spoilers here about how my dragons are different, but, repeating myself, the whole idea was to play with reader and create something that might be called a dragon, but wasn’t like the conventional image that would come to mind.
I always used Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc. for the week, with a six day work week and Sunday free. However, I avoided the term “weekend” because it generates the image of two free days in a row.
Unlike days of the week, I’m still working out what I’ll do with “months”. From the start, a month went from one full moon to the next and I didn’t use Jan/Feb/Mar—because I felt that was inconsistent with Idruz’s full moon to full moon measure. For most of the writing I avoided giving the months any names at all—it was merely the “fifth day of the second moon”. Then, having decided that the moons (there are no “months” in Idruz, if I copyedited correctly) needed names, I came up with those outlined in my 19 April entry above. However, I’m rethinking even that, and am now considering:
Winter Moon aka 1stmoon
2ndmoon
3rdmoon
Spring Moon
4thmoon
and so on…
This is more abbreviated and I think the reader will make a quicker association the familiar month— “2” associates to February faster and smoother than “second”. The down side, of course, is a word that starts with a number looks weird and is a non-standard construct. So, my choice for moon (month) terminology remains undecided. This complexity comes from simplifying “month”, such that each one starts at a full moon and ends at the next full moon.
9 May 21 Expanding on the idea in the previous post, just as the writer has to decide when to make up words and when to use established ones, they must make a similar decision regarding the way things are measured. (Including the passage of time, mentioned above.)
I’ve used “moons” as a measure time—while that is not exactly a “month” people, I think, are comfortable with the length of a moon and the concept of measuring time based on moon phases and, I’ve made the length of a moon phase = a month=more-or-less a “regular” month.
Modifications of arbitrary things, 60 minutes to an hour, 24 hours to a day—invites confusion. Of course, milliday, centiday, deciday, day, dekaday, hectoday, kiloday makes more sense—logically. In science fiction, I’d even consider working with them—but for Idruz it’ll be minutes and hours.
We often, and appropriately, deal with distance in units of time. “How far is it to your home?” “It takes three hours.” This works particularly well in a pre-industrial word. “Distance” becomes a function of the condition of the road, if you’re walking or ridding or in a wagon and what pace you set. “How far is it?” “One day by horse, if you really push it—two days if you take your time.” In terms of writing the fantasy novel, though, this is all about consistency. Someone walking can’t cover the same distance in two days as someone being chased on horseback. If the writer includes a map and it takes two months to cover three inches and two days to cover the next three then there must be an explanation.
13 May 21 First off, just ignore all the calendar stuff above in multiple entries. Overthinking it. I’ve got a simpler plan in the works.
Beyond that, this is just a hello. Reporting that progress is good writing Shilo. The bad part is the growing list of ‘things that need review in editing.’ Ugh.
On the plus side, my thought that there might be adjustments to make in Crowfood and it should rest until Shilo is further along has turned out to be prescient. The number of inconsistencies I’m discovering are far more than expected. But, at least I’m finding some of them. (I don’t know how many I’m not finding.)
Plugging away.
17 May 21 I have long theorized that one reason writing fiction is challenging is that there are two skillsets involved that don’t often come paired in people. The first is the ability to imagine and create, in your mind, this world that must be interesting and rich enough to captivate the reader. The second is the discipline to sit a computer (formerly typewriter, formerly pad of paper) for hours, convert the story into words, and physically create your manuscript. It isn’t hard to imagine the person with a great novel inside them that will, sadly, never have the discipline to put it on the page. And I can attest there are those who do sit and write—but the story appearing on paper isn’t inspiring. Perhaps the tale created wasn’t all it should have been, or maybe the fault came with the translation from mind to paper.
My experience with Shilo and Crowfood has done nothing to make me think I was wrong about this. However, it has added a new dimension. The less-fun discipline element of writing has, in the edit process, proved to be a much more time-consuming portion of the work than I had imagined. I am trying my hand at the creative, I have the discipline to record it, but I never imagined the rewriting and editing would take so much effort and time.
I’m learning, I suppose. But I do look forward to A day when I can unload more of the editing onto the professionals.
21 May 21 I've been reflecting on why, when things are rolling with the writing, I become, to be kind to myself, irascible. It was a mystery until I took the time to think it through. In the end I found it wasn’t one thing but, I think, primarily a combination of two.
The first realization was that it is taxing to move back and forth between one world and another. I might put in two or three sessions a day, and that means I’m flipping from reality to Idruz to reality to Idruz to reality. The discomfort in this is amplified by the extreme differences in the two worlds. In Idruz I control a lot more. And it is, I hope, a world that is, at its foundation, more interesting. My characters aren’t washing dishes and watching Girls5eva on TV. [To be clear, I’m not saying watching Girls5eva is not interesting, I’m saying reading about a character watching TV may not be—probably I should just think of another example, but time is up.]
The other thing that comes into play has to do with my character. My normal inclination is to clear little things off the “to do” list before diving into the big things. Shilo right now is THE big thing. By necessity, I’ve switched tactics. Shilo gets attention before anything else. The little things, like calling mom, fixing the dripping sink, making my indoor Zen garden, doing my laundry, designing my own cologne, eating food, sleeping—you know, the little things—these must now fill in available time after the day’s writing or between sessions. While this works, and is more logical, and gets the priorities right, the nagging little ‘I need to do this’ ‘I need to do that’ is now more ubiquitous.
So, I deal with it.
25 May 21 This is an intro to a topic that I expect I’ll expand on in future entries. I’m talking of objective review of manuscripts—review by the numbers.
Explaining by example: In Twelve Sharp by Janet Evanovich there are about 70,801 words. 2,419 of those are the word, “and” (3.4%). There are 84 explanation marks (one for every 843 words) and, on average, 25 words per paragraph and 9 words per sentence. The first third of Crowfood is 37793 words long. It averages 38 words per paragraph and 12 words per sentence. The word “and” appears 1124 times (3.0%) and there are 40 explanation marks (one for every 945 words).
Do I conclude I underuse explanation marks and the word “and”? Do I conclude my paragraphs and sentences are too long? We’ll get to that sometime. First, I want to point out that this type of objective analysis can apply to all kinds of parameters. One might look, for example, at their use of adverbs or their ease of reading scores. One might look at the amount of passive voice they use, and whether they overuse or underuse dialog tags.
If I wrote a book, and I wanted it to read just like Twelve Sharp, and I ran an objective analysis on my attempt, and it said my sentences were twice as long, I used half as many adverbs, my ease of reading score was 10 points lower than Twelve Sharp’s and I used the word, “the” three times a frequently as Ms. Evanovich did, then I would know that I did a poor job of writing it so it read “just like” her work.
Three paragraphs up I compared my work to one example. The style of that example isn’t much like my own. So what “objective” criteria should I use, if any at all? We’ll get to that one day, probably soon. Many things factor in—for example, the use if “I” in a first-person narrative is obviously going to appear more frequently than in a third-person narrative.
Before closing, though, I will give one real example of how I’m using this now. I have an analysis tool that tells me I should target my “passive index” to be less than 25. I’ve run the text of twelve mostly popular and well known books through that analysis and only two of the twelve had an index above five. The highest was nine. I’m comfortable taking from this that I should target a passive index of five or less.
As I said, I’m just introducing the topic today. Soon, perhaps the next entry, I’ll expand on what sort of things I think are useful to look at “objectively” and how I pick my “acceptable” range, and why I think it is important to do this type of review. And, remind me, I’ll tell you how I started down this path in the first place and I’ll moan about how much time I’ve put into it.
29 May 21 It is self-evident that if you overuse a word it becomes distracting and makes for a poor novel. And it’s well known that writers tend to gravitate toward using certain “favorites” —which I find particularly true when I’m “in the zone”—getting words down as fast as I can type.
If every page of our manuscript were filled with something like this:
The little car went up the hill to the station where the pump had a sign saying the truck for refilling the tank would arrive the day after the festival.
I (and probably we) would soon abandon it, even if it had value in other ways, the number of “the”’s would exhaust me. Imagine a 100,000 word novel, 26,000 of them “the”. Even if one could get by the above sentence, such a pattern couldn’t be sustained. (“The” is an easy word to breeze by.)
It’s clear then, there is an acceptable—or comfortable—range. A long manuscript that never uses “the” would almost certainly have to be awkwardly constructed-thus there is a minimum, as well as a maximum, in this case.
Now, to be clear, I’m not say this is some great epiphany that I alone have had. I’m guessing it is part of etymology, if nothing else. However, being unfamiliar with the science, I decide to go about it in my own duct tape and bailing wire way—but more on that later.
Henceforth when I refer to a good ‘amount’ I’m referring to a range. To edit our work such that “the” is exactly 3.217% of our manuscript would be excessive. Remember, we’re talking of every word we use—“the” is just our stand-in.
Logically, then, we come to some kind of table:
“the” 2% to 5% of your word count
“and” 1.8% to 4.8% of your word count (I’m make these up-by the way)
“of” .01% to .5% … And so forth
So, the object is to find this chart, so one knows they haven’t gone excessive on some specific word.
However—here are some twists:
* The chart would be different for different types of work—fiction vs non-fiction history vs non-fiction scientific etc... First person vs third person. Present tense vs past tense. Science fiction vs romantic history.
* Depending on what you’re trying to achieve, you might want some words treated as equal: maybe=perhaps=might
* Variations can throw things off: dust, dusted, dusting, duster, dust-bunny, dusty
* The nature of the work you’re evaluating. For example, I “overuse”, among many others, the words: dragon sword pixie tanner —this doesn’t automatically concern me—I’d expect it considering how the nature of my story compares to some generic data pulled from a large diverse body of other works.
* Frequencies are dependent on time and country—England’s 1965 frequencies won’t match he U.S.’s 2021 charts.
To wrap this for today, my attempt to find an existing table I could use against my novels failed. I did find charts created from huge bodies of work but they were unusable because (1) of all the complicating factors I listed above and (2) counts presented as a single percentage--no range given. How much can you miss the number by and still be in okay territory for a given word?
2 Jun 21 We can and should expand the previous entry to parameters other than just the count of specific words. I want to emphasize “should” here—because I’ve found what I’m going to discuss below more useful than the granular, one-word-at-a-time analysis.
Here are some samples. This is all about comparing our actual, objective numbers to an established range of what is reasonable and comfortable for the reader:
Percentage of your words that are adjectives
Percentage of your words that are adverbs
Average sentence, word and paragraph lengths
Percent of passive voice
Percent that is dialog
Percent of dialog that is tagged
Ratio of words to different punctuations: ! ? . , …
Ease of reading standards
Many of the twists listed in this journal’s previous entry apply here. And there or unique twists as well. From my own experience, for example, my first crunch says that I have long sentences. However, I heavily use the em dash “—” in place of the semi-colon. My tool that counts sentences sees the semi-colon as separating two sentences, but not the dash. So: “He went to bed; he slept.” Would count as two shorter sentences compared to one longer sentence: “He went to bed—he slept.”
In the next entry I’ll explain my work-around for not having any useful reference tables to compare my work against.
6 Jun 21 So, after the above three entries in this log, we’re left with this huge bag of objective data. Lots of numbers. (I believe I’ve already mentioned that I’m getting the numbers mostly from a writing assistance software package I use.)
We have this huge pile of data, but not the parameters by which we judge the numbers as acceptable or suspect. I got the text of twelve works of fiction—some well-known, did the same analysis on them, and compared.
A word of caution on this—you want to be sure the numbers you’re pulling from your work and the numbers you’re pulling from your sample are gathered using the same techniques. Different software will give you different word counts, may consider different things as sentence breaks, may count “haven’t” as one word, or two, and so on. As a quick example, the macro I use to count words says one document has 39,694 words—the Word utility for counting says it has 39,580.
To wrap up this whole by-the-numbers chain of entries I’ll list some findings regarding my own work—that is, my work when compared to the 12 samples of other popular fiction that I selected.
My use of these words was near or above the highest use in any of my samples: some, sometime, same, than, little, made … and many more. Since beginning this project I’ve shifted my view that I had to aggressively reduce my use of these words. Each of my samples uses one word or another more than any other sample—so my work using “same” more than any sample is a cautionary note—it doesn’t mean I need to spend hours rooting out “same”, and all the other words. But it’s good to be aware of them.
As to the other parameters—sentence and paragraph lengths; use of adjectives; easy reading scores; amount of dialog; amount of passive voice and so on—my work fell happily within the general range of my twelve samples.
I do want to add one note—consider the limits you set carefully. One piece of guidance I have says, “Passive voice should be kept below 25%”; however, the range in my samples was 3% to 9% ; 3% to 5% if you cut the top two samples. I’m working to keep it below 5%, not 25%.
13 Jun 21 You may notice some days more than usual have passed since my last entry. Some family stuff--you know how it goes. But now I need to focus on getting back into the zone, so I won't be doing any journaling until my daily writing gets back into a regular rhythm.
For a quick status check, above I believe I mentioned about working toward chapter 90--I just started chapter 100 and anticipate it will be around 120 chapters in the end. The word count is now somewhere around the longest of the Harry Potter books and would make more than two books of 'reasonably' length (120K words per book). I keep considering making it into two books or a trilogy--however, I have two issues with doing that: 1: I'm not certain there are good places to break the manuscript into something I feel are good, self-contained bits; 2: I'm not hot on the idea of making the reader pay for three books instead of one; 3: (I said two, but I thought of another) Shilo in two or three parts would require two or three cover designs, promotion campaigns, marketing--that is, all the extra production design stuff.
This journal will continue, but expect something of a break for a time while I focus on giving Shilo its deserved attention.
Oh, yeah, I'll mention one other thing--as we come out of the COVID lifestyle other annoying and distracting long-delayed tasks are trying to grab some of my attention. But I work on.
2 Jul 21 Let’s talk about—I’ll talk you listen, unless you want to use my contact form—which no one has yet—sad face: Let’s talk about ‘Writing Styles’.
Writing style by ‘for instance’: If someone writes a book that is indistinguishable from one written by Issac Asimov, then one would say they’ve written in his style. On reflection, perhaps there are two elements to that—one being the mechanics—the analytic objective arrangement of words (as I touched on previously using the Twelve Sharp example—25 May 21). The second would be topic and plot development choices. If you rewrote Twelve Sharp to have the same average paragraph length, average word length, same proportion of verbs and adverbs and nouns and “the”s and the same percent of passive verse active voice and the same proportion of dialog vs non-dialog yada yada yada— the same as, for example, Foundation—I don’t think too many people would consider it the work of Asimov or Evanovich. I don’t need to say the reverse is also true—but I do say it because it’s fun to think of Foundation being rewritten to the rhythm of Twelve Sharp.
I couldn’t write to someone else’s style, it would be a catastrophe if I tried.
However, that’s not the same as saying I can’t improve my style or modify my style. Changes I’ve made to date, among others, include reducing my use of the passive voice and writing to a higher “ease of reading” score. I’ve gradually moved from making these changes during the edit process to (almost) naturally incorporating them as I type the first draft. Recently I discovered Word’s ability to mark a passive sentence as I type. That is useful. [( It is buried deep, if you’re interested: Word 2010: File tab: options/proofing/ Section Headed: “when correcting spelling and grammar in word” —it’s probably set to “grammar only” — select “settings” then “Grammar only” in the dropdown then find the checkbox labeled “passive sentences” and check it. There are several other optional things to check for you to consider. This only works if you have word set to check grammar as you type. )]
Another aspect of writing styles is reflected in the oft proffered question: Who is your audience? I’d be confounded if someone said, “That’s okay, but re-write it to be more appealing to twenty to thirty-five year old blue color working moms.” Huh? What… I’m not saying this is a bad thing—I applaud anyone who can do it. But modifying my prose in such a way is beyond my skillset.
6 Jul 21 Regarding my previous entry, on “writing styles”; and this entry, which is about the “writing process”: I am defining these terms in whatever way my scattered brain thinks they should be defined. No doubt there are accepted and formal meanings to “writing style” and “writing process”—someday I should probably learn what they officially are. In other (cliché) words: I’m just winging this—it’s all off the cuff.
I’d say the writing process means something similar to the writer’s habits. (Or, the process of the writer—but that is circular so…)
Like ‘style’, I divide ‘process’ into two elements. The first is how you create your story and plot and characters, the second would be your physical habits.
By physical habits I mean when you write, how long a “session” is, do you write steadily, or in bursts. Do you discipline yourself—9: to 5: ; five days a week? Are you unable to be creative until eight at night, then you type away until two or three in the morning? Do you have a daily word count goal… and so on. For me, as indicated in my 21 May 21 entry, I have to fight my natural tendency to put my writing off until I’ve completed all my other little ‘to do’ things.
Obviously this is going to be different from one writer to another—no one can tell you how you should do it. What I’d say is this: be cognizant of your patterns and if they’re working. Be prepared to force a change if they’re not. Two things I’ve dealt with:
(I) Long periods of inactivity. This wasn’t writer’s block—this was periods where “other” things in life had me pushing the writing’s priority low enough that it wasn’t getting done. Ashamed—I admit that one has been the explosion of entertaining movies and TV provided courtesy of Netflix, Apple TV, Disney+, SyFi Channel, Amazon Prime, HBO, and so forth. There’s plenty to watch and it’s faster-paced and easier than writing. Family commitments and (as mentioned) all those other daily chores have frequently had impacts. I wasted most of the opportunity COVID—in all of its nastiness—provided to focus on the work.
(II) During the course of a day I found myself ‘waiting until I was ready to go’—which often turned out to be eight pm—by nine I was too sleepy to continue, so not much got done that way.
Here is my current framework.
A: Doing the writing is priority—I will write almost every day
B: A Day’s work is at least 1500 word.
C: (As a security blanket—so it feels less intimidating) I’ll do a 10am, 2pm, and 6pm session of 500 words each.
Regarding C: I don’t ever stick to this. Sometimes I don’t get started until 2pm. Sometimes I write the whole 1500 words in one setting. Sometimes I start later. Sometimes I work into the night. Sometimes I do more than 1500 words. The point is, though, that this feels like a small thing I’m asking myself to do. Sit down three times and bang out 500 words—that’s nothing. I can do that. If I don’t do it—if five pm rolls up and I haven’t done a thing, then I have to get to work and do my 1500, because I haven’t asked too much of myself, if I’m not even committed enough to throw out 500 words a couple times a day then… I’m prattling. You get the idea. (Frankly, it comes down to guilt as a motivator—I’ve told myself I will do it, I know I can—so it’s guilt time if I don’t.)
10 Jul 21 My pervious entry didn’t get to the second element of “writing process” because the first element became rambling and nearly incoherent. I’ll try to keep this shorter.
The first part above—6 July 91—was fundamentally about when you sit and what things might distract one and keep them from their keyboard. It comes down to commitment.
Aspect two is how (and in a sense, when) does the writer create their plot and characters. The extremes here would be someone who begins with a five hundred page paragraph by paragraph outline of their planned four hundred page book; then they create a four page profile of each character—what’s their motivation, what do they look like, how do they walk, how do they talk.
The opposite would be, for example: The writer starts with, “I walked in on my wife unexpectedly—she was floating three feet above the bed.” —and then says: ‘I’ll just have to see where the rest of the novel goes from there.’
I’m a lot closer to the second example, and it’s much easier to write that way, but it is full of traps. For example, in Crowfood I was well past half way through the first draft before I selected an ending. Had I created the world in total, the plots and the characters, before beginning the actual writing, then I would not have had many of the issues I’ve listed in previous entries, above. See: 7 April; 11 April; 19 April; 23 April; and 5 & 9 May—partly; for some things I’ve dealt with that wouldn’t have been a bother with proper planning.
What I do is begin at a starting point and write in the direction of the finish. What happens in between invariably surprises me. However, where I am now with Shilo is writing a segment that overlaps Crowfood. That means I already have specific scenes for parts of the book. For the rest she must be at the places she was in the other book, at the times when she was there, so I have a loose outline.
One thing that drew me to doing Shilo was that I wanted to see some Crowfood scenes from Shilo’s perspective. But Shilo turned out to be much more expansive than I expected and those overlapping moments, told from the different perspective, were not a dominant part of Shilo. It is good experience for me to write this overlapping portion of Shilo using Crowfood as the outline.
Future works will be planned out more, but the outlines will not be so complete or rigid that no surprises come as I’m typing along.
14 Jul 21 I keep in mind that most communication between people is non-verbal when I write. I will have an entry about that soon. However, today’s blip is about verbal, non-word communications.
Initially, I tried to write the sound my character was making—things like: Uh, Ug, Umm, Mmm, Ah, Eh, Eee, oh… and so forth. It took me longer than it should have to accept that I couldn’t just spell out random sounds—particularly since the sound was intended to have a specific meaning. I got the term ‘interjection’ from some basic research—though I find it too broad because “regular” words can also be interjections. To me, what best describes what I have in mind here is: ‘non-lexical conversational sounds’. The character is speaking something with meaning, but it isn’t a word.
To the point, then—many “sounds” have standardized spellings and meanings. Half-an-effort will get you all kinds of lists. Probably best to use them as given—meanings are established—they are barely different from words in that respect.
If your character makes a sound like “aw”—write the not-word that has the meaning you are intending for that character to express. aw ≠ aww ≠ ah ≠ ahh is sometime=aah and so forth. One editing project for me will be going back and replacing my randomly spelled non-lexical conversational sounds with the appropriate, cataloged, not-words.
I suppose one should ask: Why use them at all? In part that comes down to if you want to write your dialogue to better emulate the way people speak, or to best fit the format of presentation—written words on a page. To me, either is valid—that should be left to the whims of the author.
At first one might think, ‘but we’re only talking about five or six or ten terms, right?’ While I’m not going to make a dictionary here, allow me to give you the A to E’s of one list: aah ah aha ahh argh arrr aw aww bah beh blah blech blerg bwahaha criminy duh eh er erm ew
7 Sep 21 Unfortunatly the gap in journal entry dates does reflect a lack of proper attention to my book. I have been writing sporadically, not at an appropriately productive pace. Home repairs, car repairs, relative visits… And so forth. One thing I have done some of over the past couple months is first-pass review and editing. Many months and words have passed since I started. I’m going back and doing first proof on the earlier parts of the book.
This review, before the first draft is complete, is useful in a couple ways. First, it gives me an opportunity to work even when I’m not in a good environment for writing: for example, I can take printed pages to a doctor’s office and mark them up while I’m in the waiting room. Also, if there is something I want to watch on the boob tube which doesn’t require my full attention, I can have it on the TV and enter my edits at the same time. And—I get a jump-start on the long and arduous proofing process.
The second way this review/editing of the first part is useful, even when I haven’t completed the ending, is that it gives reminders of what I’d written months earlier. It helps even the tone and provide consistence between the beginning and end of the book.
11 Sep 21 Dropping a quick note here about something that’s been on my mind. Crowfood was always intended to be a fantasy book were the protagonist is in the foreground and the fantasy elements are in the background. Brylun is the every-day-man in the bad situation—and there are giants, wizards and dragons too. But I often found, writing Crowfood that I’d gone pages without reference to any fantastical element. I’d think, oh, I really need to stick in a fairy, or giant or dragon. And than I would do that.
The same is happening with Shilo. It is a much longer book and pages, even chapters, will pass without a fantastical element. I begin to wonder, then, if what I’m writing truly falls into the fantasy genera. It does, I suppose. After considering what it’d be if one removed the fantasy elements I have to conclude they’re integral to the book, even if they aren’t always at the forefront or even the main point of the manuscript.
Just thought to apply the same question to a book I started—Cold Welcome by Elizabeth Moon. It’s a close parallel. There is no doubt Cold Welcome is Science Fiction. And you do see a bit more of it, page to page, than you see of fantasy in Shilo. However, it is still the case that the story is about the people-to-people relationships and circumstances. Ky’s crash, for example, could have been a hot air balloon, ship or airplane. The fact that it’s a transport from a space ship, along with other elements, makes it Science Fiction.
I suppose it is self-evident that twisting the story from one genre to another might gain one some readers and loose others. In my youth, so many years ago, I read little but Sci-fi. But I also know those who would quit reading as soon as they came across the word wizard or phrase worm hole.
15 Sep 21 In my 14 July entry I said I’d get back to the issue of non-verbal communications. Mostly, my thinking on this falls back to studies that say seventy to ninety-three percent of all communications is non-verbal.
As a writer, telling a story to a reader, the only medium available is words. (We will set aside for now things like books with pictures and cover art and such.) The printed word is, basically, verbal communications. I say that in the respect that there is not a word in books that can’t be spoken, and not a spoken word that can’t be written. So, one ends up with this almost-paradox that the written word is entirely non-verbal communications and yet is as closely related and intimate with verbal communications as anything.
Now, on to the topic. In handling non-verbal communications in our manuscript I come up with these considerations:
* How much do you want non-verbal exchanges as part of the work? (Reflecting real life, do you want five times more communications outside of the “quotes” as inside?)
* What I have been considering the same as non-verbal, but really isn’t, is meaning expressed in tone and inflection. As in: she murmured. ‘“That’s great,” she murmured’ is very different from, ‘“That’s great,” she screamed’ If the listener can’t see the speaker they will still pick up the difference in meanings—so that is verbal.
* Fully non-verbal, then, is things like: ‘she shrugged’ ‘she stuck her tongue out’ ‘I hate you, she glared at him’
I am particularly partial to—perhaps overly partial to—the final construct in the bullet above: ‘I hate you, she glared at him.’ To my way of thinking, this both reflects the non-verbal nature of most interactions and gets the message across.
“She glared,” alone, could have many meanings. “I hate you,” spoken, needs qualifiers—although one will begin (depending on context) assuming anger. ‘“I hate you,” she screamed.’ is far from: ‘“I hate you,” she said softly as her anger faded and she stepped into his embrace.’ BUT: ‘I hate you, she glared at him.’ gives a solid message with little room for misinterpretation, does it in a realistic non-verbal fashion, and provides a decent picture for readers who visualize.
I sometimes muse that directing movies may have been an alternate calling for me. I can see myself telling actors to ‘tilt your head a little when she says that’ ‘look like you’re thinking of something else’ ‘don’t look interested—look spellbound—show adoration’.
How much this kind of subtly appears in a novel will, of course, be up to the author. Do they want the shades provided by: “Get out,” she screamed.’ Vs. ‘“Get out,” she said, her jaws clinched and her face turning red.’ Vs. “Get out!”
What we know is, for making a detailed picture, the written word can’t compete with the real thing, or images. The writer decides the amount of detail to impart and how to do it, but is limited. I like playing up the non-verbal because that is the way people interface, and it is more fun to write. I’ll leave you with:
“I am not happy,” she said.
“I am not happy!”
“I am not happy,” she snarled.
I am not happy, her glare said.
12 Oct 21 Hi all. Just a note to say I'm suspending this journal for a time. Work on the books is creeping and I want to concentrate on getting back into productive habits with that. I'll be back when I'm satisfied Shilo and Crowfood are moving along at a satisfactory pace again.
26 Oct 22 Over a year! Progress has been slow and unsteady. However, I have just finished the first draft of Shilo! So now, lots of editing. (Just a moment--it's election time and I have to mute the bloody political commercials. Okay, I'm back.) Sooooo... What's next? *Pre-professional editing *Professional proof reading *Study: How to get a publisher and--fallback--how to self publish *Study: How to get a literary agent *Study: How to advertise and promote. Aside from preliminaries for finding a publisher, I'm looking at world-wide edits. For example, there are common typos due to speed and touch-typing and imperfect proof reading--example, Silo where Shilo was intended. Also, there are a couple global name changes--including the main character of Crowfood, who will change from 'Brylun' to 'Thaxon'. For manageable file size Shilo and Crowfood are stored in ten files (A,B and C for the shorter Crowfood and A,B,C,D,E...,J for Shilo. Shilo is a bit longer at 390 thousand words compared to Crowfood's 112 thousand. Anyway, the point I'm having trouble getting to is that I will have to experiment to see how my computer, MS Word, and my writing aid software handle longer files and check about making global changes to multiple smaller files with minimum fuss. My two immediate projects are to find the best way to handle a combined half million words, as I just stated, and to clean-up and start working on the list of "things to address in editing" that I made as I went. (Just checked, that list is over 180 items long... sigh.)
26 May 23 Here is the latest update that absolutely no one has been clamoring for! I’m unhappy to announce that there isn’t much new. Right now both books are in a single file and I’ve done some global editing—like replacing ‘month’ with ‘moon’. And “Brylun” with “Thaxon” and some of my most common typos (wonder and wander—for example.)
More to the point on content, I’ve gotten feedback from three beta readers on Shilo. One dominant item is the need to break Shilo into smaller units—which will include making it multiple physical books and making the episodic nature more explicit—sort of chopping it into sequential related short stories.
This slowdown in progress during the ‘beta reader phase’ is not unique—I do believe the same happened with Crowfood. There are a few reasons for this, I think. One is the discomfort of having to shift mentally from writing to editing. Another is having to take in and process the criticisms. It is some task to decide which ones you agree require work and which you will ignore. Related may be cases where you agree with the comment, but either don’t know how to fix it, or accept that it will remain an imperfection in place. The work will never be perfect to every reader—or to myself.
Encapsulating, there is a certain high to getting that final word on the page. It is exhausting, then, to face the mountain of work that still lies ahead. (And isn’t as much fun as the original writing.) One looks forward to the day when such tasks can be entrusted to editors.
