Tag Archives: critiques

Breaking the Author – Week Three

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Third week tucked into my belt for this year’s authorial challenge, Breaking the Author!

I was sick for most of this week, and unlike last year when I was sick, I didn’t force myself to complete daily goals to the detriment of my health. So while I had a couple extra things early in the week I was hoping to get around to, I just didn’t have the health for it this week.

The goals I wanted to achieve were thus:

  1. Finish first-pass edits on Shapes 1. – Completed this Tuesday night.
  2. Plot out Shapes 2 with a rough outline. – Completed this Friday night.
  3. Start line edits on Shapes 1. – Did not even begin this.
  4. Edit “Shibboleth” and “Damp Summer Nights” short stories. Did not even attempt.
  5. Maintain blog. – Completed.

So I finished 3 of my 5 goals this week, but I don’t feel too down about it.  Continue reading →

Seeing the Forest for the Trees

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It’s Thursday and I want to talk about a particular experience I had over the last month or so that is relevant to my current editing goals.

In December of last year I was doing my best to hit my daily goal of words written, because I had a novel I wanted to finish and a year of writing to smash to pieces. I was successful at both of those, but right there in the middle of it all I had some random inspiration and wrote a short story.

I haven’t posted the short story on the blog, nor have I submitted it anywhere for publication consideration yet. Part of that is that the story isn’t ready yet. Continue reading →

Breaking the Author – Week Two

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I’ve completed the second week of this year’s challenge, Breaking the Author, and now you get to see me brag about it a bit!

This week’s goals mostly centered around the shapeshifter novella. I edited roughly 50 pages this week, and I have another 25 or so to go for a completed first pass on edits. The first pass is mostly correcting inconsistencies and looking for things that are obviously wrong or that I knew I was going to change already. After the major revisions to story and character are complete, I will delve deeper into a line edit and polish up the prose and dialogue as best I can, followed by a check for spelling, grammar, syntax, etc. The final pass will consist of a live reading in which I will be correcting anything that doesn’t sound good when I read it aloud. Continue reading →