by krj | Jan 28, 2014 | Books, misc, Projects, Writing
It’s amazing how time can get away from you, especially if you’re in a place where you’re not taking much care to watch how it’s flitting by. Or speeding by. The last post I wrote here said I finished writing the sequel to Omni in 2012. Yes, 2012. As it so happens, the world didn’t end. Just like the world didn’t end, the sequel to Omni (Omni 2: the Omniing—no, that’s not the title; it’s an inside joke) wasn’t published. That means, of course, that I still haven’t completely finished the book. How is it that I finished writing a book more than a year ago, yet haven’t said anything further about it, let alone published it? Good question. Indulge me for a moment as I recall a quick story. Years ago, when talking to a gentleman I opened the conversation with, “Hi. How are you today?” (I actually wanted a response–it’s not a greeting, damn it.) His response was roughly thus, “Interesting. I’ve had an interesting day.” As we continued to speak he told me the meaning of his response. “When I was training, I was taught that when you’re having a bad day and you don’t want the other person to know, you say you’re having an ‘interesting’ day.” With that in mind, 2013 was interesting in a lot of ways. However, in just as many ways as it was painful, last year was also a time of exponential growth and unexpected positives that, on the whole, turned what could have been a festering, rotting pile of rubbish into a pretty—albeit small—flower bed. It’s not often you get dealt...
by krj | Sep 8, 2011 | Writing
So this’ll be quick, and the good part is that everyone should be able to do this. (Caveat: if you’re running Linux, it becomes a little more difficult since you’ll need to do a little googling for appropriate software, but for Windows and Mac folks, you’re golden!) So you just finished the final revision on your novel and it’s time for proofreading. This technique won’t catch everything and isn’t a replacement for a professional proofreader, but you may be surprised to find just how much it does catch. What’s the technique? Text-to-speech. Seriously, text-to-speech. If you’ve heard of the technique of reading your manuscript aloud (I covered this in a previous blog post, Crossed the Finish Line), then the next logical step is to get someone to read it aloud to you. (Okay, maybe it’s not the next logical step, but it’s a good one.) While reading your text aloud is certainly a good technique, and one that I intend to continue to use (it’s especially good for dialogue because you really get the flow by speaking it aloud), your brain is still liable to do things you don’t want it to do. At this point in your revision process, you’ve likely read over your text several times, perhaps a dozen or more, and you know what you mean when it comes to damn near every last sentence. While reading it aloud forces a different part of your brain to engage, it’s still your brain and it can and will be influenced by your memory of the project, be it actual or envisioned. A computer, however, can only read...
by krj | Jun 9, 2011 | Writing
I may be alone in this, but as a writer, I’m endlessly fascinated by the myriad ways there are to write. To be more specific, I’m actually referring to novel writing because that’s where my interests lie, but I imagine it could likely be applied to other types just as easily. Regardless, there’s no one way to write, and I like to take the occasional look to see how others do it. You can sum up the process into roughly three stages: planning, writing, revising. I think most people can agree to that, whether their planning consists of, “Oh, I have a great idea!” or it’s months of outlining, those are the essential steps. But it’s how writers go through those steps that makes them different, and to me, interesting. The most likely differences you’ll find in comparing one writer to another is in how much planning goes into their work. Some people obsess over doing very detailed outlines, some to the point that every chapter or even every scene is determined before they sit down and write, while others do little to no outlining at all. The person who outlines may very well know exactly how the story is going to flow, all of the way to the end, while the one who opts to just dive right in might not know what the story is about, let alone how it’s going to end. Perhaps the most interesting thing about that to me is that people can follow either of those ways, or anything in between, and be successful (I’m defining success here as completion of a manuscript)....
