Monday Memo: Re-write the damn thing!

Okay, time to get back up to date now.

Note to self: Once you realise something doesn't work, stop fussing about and just re-write the damn thing, you know you'll have to in the end.

Secret Service is finally gone. It was a bit of a bugger - I think I only managed to save about 3000 from my first draft, but the re-writes finally paid off once I stopped trying to fix something that would never work and just wrote most of it again from scratch. I also re-wrote the synopsis - only the first paragraph or two were accurate once I finished the re-write!

It's with my editor now, so I have my fingers crossed for it.

The Stroke of Twelve verdict is in. It didn't make it into the anthology I was originally aiming for (it didn't fit the tone set by the other stories in it), but TEB still liked it and I was offered a contract for it as a stand alone. It's now going to be extended into a novel length story and it's going to slip into my Perfect Timing series in place of Time Out, which is going to form the basis for a whole new series I have planed :)

I'm actually quite pleased. Don't get me wrong, I'd have loved to have been in the anthology, but I'm also really existed about extending the story and giving it room to grow into something a lot better than it is right now.

A Model Submissive - my nano project is slightly behind schedule. I should have been on 15k last night, I was on 14k. Hoping to catch up a bit tonight.

Okay... I think that's it. All up to date :)

Except one other announcement - there's a chat tonight with Total-e-bound authors on Night Owl Romance. It starts at 8 pm EST and runs to 10 pm EST. In British currancy, I think that translates to 1-3 am tomorrow morning.

I'll certainly be there at the start, and hopefully until quite a way through it.

Drop by if you can.

Monday Memo: Writing Lessons

Note to self: Time's not truly wasted if you learnt something in the process.

Well, over the weekend I learned that sometimes you just have to start again from scratch. No, that's a lie, I actually started again with nine words.

The title, the two main characters names and the words Chapter One, were copied and pasted from Time Out and put into the new draft.

And that's it.

Remember how I thought most of the original draft of the story could be saved.

Nine words.

On Friday, after I posted my five things, I finally admitted to myself that while I love the idea Time Out contains, it just wasn't working in the format I originally wrote it in.

Adding together the first draft and my first attempt at a re-write, I've scraped 48,200 words in total - 19 writing days worth of work.

On Friday, I also started a bit of a writing marathon. I wrote 5,500 words on Friday. 6,000 on Saturday. 5,000 on Sunday. 16,500 words over the weekend on Time Out re-write 2. That's more each day than I've written on any other day this year, and by far the best weekend.

Which brings me to what I learnt. Those 19 days weren't wasted. I learnt a lot about the characters. I learnt a whole list of things that didn't work. I learnt a lot about how (and how not to) tackle re-writes. And most of all I learnt that sometimes you just have to face reality and get on with it. All of those things helped me get those 16,500 words out over the weekend. It was worth it.

So, what's on the cards for this week, you ask? (And, no, there's really no point saying you didn't ask, I'm going to tell you anyway :) )

I had planned to finish Time Out by yesterday. I still have about 20k left to go on it. With a bit of re-jigging, that's not a problem. By the hour - which I should have started today - can wait a little while longer. I'm going to try to get as much as I can of Time Out done this week.

I am, however, starting my new editing project today - right on schedule. For the Duration is a m/m novella - Book 3 in the Perfect Timing Series. I'm hoping to submit it at the end of the month.

I wrote the first draft back at the beginning of June and I haven't looked at it since, so I'm going to read it through with fresh eyes now and decide what needs to be done with it.

Wish me luck :)

P.S. The submission deadline for my submission for the Christmas Spirit's Anthology was today, so the results should be out soon...

Wondering about the wonderful world of re-writes

As I mentioned when I started the blog, I wrote for quite a while before I started editing anything or submitting it to publishers.

So I have a lot of first drafts lying around on my hard drive waiting to be edited up. My two main writing projects for the month (The last two for the Perfect Timing Series) are re-writes of two of these old drafts.

The one I'm grappling with at the moment is called Time Out. It's a m/m BDSM novel. I wrote the first draft February 2007.

At the time I thought it was the best thing I'd ever written. I'm not sure how to discribe just how pleased I was with the story without slipping into cliches. I really thought it was chocolate.

So, when I sat down to work on it yesterday I thought I was onto a good thing. A bit of spit and polish. Add a few thousand words to bring it up to the word count I want. Tidy up a few loose ends. An easy job. By the weekend I'd move onto my next writing project way ahead of schedule.
Ha!

It turns out the story I thought was chocolate is about as useful as a chocolate fireguard. All the wondeful things I remember about the story just melted away under.

In short, the story really, really sucks.

But! There is hope.

Well, there better bloody well be hope for the story, because I still love it. I don't know how much of the original will be left by the time I've finished with it, but the core - the idea I first fell for when I started writing it - that's going to somehow survive.

Within the next two weeks the story is going to turn into what I remember it being.

Okay, now that I've given myself that little pep talk (Didn't you hear the rousing Hollywood theme music kick in half way though?) in other news...

I finished the re-write of Whispers yesterday. I've put that to one side for a day or two. I'm going to start editing it on Friday.