by krj | Jul 8, 2011 | Projects
I finished my final draft of my manuscript and submitted it to my editor yesterday. Whew! I’m not sure I can even begin to describe how stressful the final haul was, and it was all entirely unnecessary. The reality is that I discovered a couple of things late into my editing process that, by the time I discovered them, my deadline was looming and that meant I had precious little time to get through those processes. One of them turned out to be a piece of software that I discovered thanks to Smart Self-Publishing by Zoe Winters. This may be getting a little too inside baseball for my purposes here of sharing what’s going on, but as it so happens, there are some pretty smart people who have whipped up software that makes me think of Word’s grammar checker, only on steroids. And meth. And cocaine. And any other stimulant you can think of. Maybe caffeine, for instance. Anyhow, Editor, as it is know, is a fairly simple program that, when used wisely, can greatly improve your work if you’ve been lazy or have picked up bad habits along the way. In my case, it’s probably a little of both. Regardless, the software, in a nutshell, basically analyzes your writing and makes a bunch of observations and suggestions and leaves the work to you. Because it analyzes so many different kinds of things, you can end up with an exhaustive list of items to check off. In my case, it turned out to be thousands of things that I decided to go through to polish up my work. Was...
by krj | Jun 30, 2011 | Projects
Today is going to be a grueling day for me, not because I’m doing roofing or tarring roads or digging ditches or anything physically intensive, but because I’m planning on spending the day in front of my computer to get as much editing done as possible. When I last posted and speculated that I had plenty of time to finish my revision process before submitting my manuscript to my editor, I think I was being delusional, but not entirely so. It’s amazing how one day a person can have so much free time, and then a week or so later, have almost none. It’s getting down to the final few days at this point, and what once looked like a manageable (though still difficult) road has turned into a crazy, dangerous road that only the insane would dare to follow. Hooray for insanity! It’s actually been somewhat unavoidable, as such things are, but not because of the usual “personal reasons” or “something just came up” or other such reasons. No, it’s because at the last moment I decided to try something brand new as far as editing and revision are to me, and frankly, I think it’s for the better. At the very least, I’ve cleaned up a lot of grammar issues that sticklers would gripe about and I’ve had a chance to approach things from a different angle which is usually greatly educational for me (and this definitely has been). Still, I have a lot left to do, including the addition of another technique that I may or may not have the time to get to, but one...
by krj | Jun 17, 2011 | Projects
The revision process is a lengthy one, and for perfectionists like myself, possibly infinite. It’s difficult to say for certain when your story is done because it’s easy to continually polish and revise. That’s what makes deadlines a great thing, even if they’re self-imposed. My to-be-named book has just entered the last stage of the revision process before it goes to editing. I actually finished going through it yesterday, but there’s still a few little things to do here and there, thus why I say I’m in the final stage. The revision process for me tends to be somewhat lengthy, but a good part of that is time that’s spent working on other projects because time (and distance) is a necessity where revision is concerned. In this case, I’m now at the point where the only time and distance I’m going to get from it is when it’s away being picked apart by my editor. Once I get it back from him it’ll be a hard crunch to get it tidied up as quickly as possible and then it’s time to publish. Because it’s so close to the end now, it’s also time to find an artist to do the cover. I think I have an idea for what I’d like the art to consist of. I’m picturing a scene from the first chapter that involves a building that’s just been bombed. I see this building in the foreground (or possibly the middle) with two of the main characters standing next to it immediately following the blast (how is that possible? You’ll have to read to find out) with...
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)....
by krj | Jun 6, 2011 | Self-publishing
For those of us who are geeks, especially those are Apple fanboys, and perhaps yet more for those are developers, Apple today kicked off World Wide Developers Conference 2011 — WWDC. For those who don’t know what this is, it’s essentially a week-long event hosted by Apple for the benefit of people who make software and hardware for their products. So if this is an event for developers, why am I writing about it on a publishing/writing/editing/etc. blog? Well, it’s all in the title: iBooks and iCloud. At WWDC today, Apple announced a boatload of new things, and one of those was a syncing feature for iBooks using their new service, iCloud. This isn’t active just yet (except for those doing testing), and I may be wrong about this, but I see this new feature as a Good Thing for writers. In a nutshell, iBooks syncing through iCloud will make it super simple for users to take anything they’ve purchased in the iBooks store and quickly and easily send it to their other iOS devices for consumption. Beyond that, it appears as though it’ll work like Amazon’s WhisperNet which automatically syncs your Kindle (and Kindle apps) with bookmarks, highlights, notes, last page read, etc, only this’ll be for iBooks. A big problem with iOS right now, and to a somewhat lesser degree other mobile platforms, is syncing. This is going to be a big step in the right direction for Apple once this goes live, and if there’s something that can be said of making things easier for consumers, it’s usually that it benefits everyone. Take the Kindle for...
