Hundreds of people posted Thanksgiving cards et cetera online this week, which means that large chunks of America are more or less missing from the blogosphere. Well, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em…
For the last time this year (yay!) I’ll open up this linkfest with a few NaNoWriMo links. It’s probably unkind of me to note at this point that there are a darn sight fewer NaNo links this week than there were in Week 1, but then most of the entrants (including myself) didn’t make it to the end for one reason or another.
Kristen Lamb apparently did, which announcement caused me to go and re-read her blog entry from last week which appeared to state otherwise… Aha. Yet another idiom fails to make it across the Pond intact. I read “I still have 2,777 words” as “2,777 words completed”, whereas Kristen intended us to understand that she still had “2,777 words to go”. Big difference there, and congratulations Kristen!
Lynn Viehl’s only a third of the way through, but that’s OK because we know she has the self-discipline to continue until her first draft is complete, regardless of the NaNo deadline. Mary Jo Campbell’s almost to the halfway point and toying with her stats, wondering whose stupid idea this was anyway. Jordan Rosenfeld is further on, contemplating 35,000 words of “dreck” that would normally have taken her three or four months to produce.
Natalie Whipple didn’t do NaNo–she just wrote 37,000 words in 2.5 weeks anyway, bringing her completed first draft to a total of 58K presumably not-entirely-dreck words. She seems fairly pleased with it, despite the speed. Jeff Cohen termed this the most dangerous moment in the life of a book, and urged much caution and even more editing. In similar vein, James Chartrand of Men With Pens likened frequent writing without attention to the craft to frequent driving without improvement beyond the basics. And we all know how many bad drivers there are out there…
So. Editing time, then.
At Let The Words Flow, Julie Eshbaugh wrote about Chekhov’s Gun (read: foreshadowing), which is one of the many, many things that should go into a novel somewhere between the first draft and submission.
On The Other Side of the Story, guest writer Juliette Wade explained that there is a difference between revising a scene and fully rewriting it–with examples.
For all those of us with truly awful writing habits, Write It Sideways are planning a 31-Day Makeover Challenge. This set of tips and tricks–but mostly tips–will be published daily throughout January 2011, and will include items with themes as disparate as finding inspiration and writing on a budget.
Terry Pratchett is presiding over a contest to find unpublished SF/fantasy novelists living in the UK (are you listening Matt?). The deadline is December 31st, and the full work needs to be entered, so if you don’t happen to have an unpublished SF/F manuscript lying in a drawer somewhere already you’re probably too late. That said, the prize is a juicy £20,000 advance–enough to allow most of us to do nothing but write for a full year–which might spur some on to NaNo-like efforts.
Lynne Patrick published her must-read exposé of the economics of publishing a week or so back. She followed up this week by answering comments that had been made in response to her original article. Pop over to Hey, There’s A Dead Guy In The Living Room for a dispiriting insight into the costing of a book, and much more.
Even though there’s very little money to be made through it, the urge of authors to be published remains strong. Lynn Viehl produced a list of ten current submission opportunities across the board, from novels to poetry, online and off. She also provided a resource link. In similar vein, Gary Smailes over at Bubblecow started a series highlighting publishers who will consider submissions from writers without an agent.
Meantime, there are scams a-plenty to avoid. Like the one James Frey perpetuated on the MFA students of America. Or like less high-profile, but equally damaging, idea thieves.
The Guardian ran a piece this week about the King James Bible, just about to reach its 400th year and never out of print yet. It’s always a shock to realise how much our mundane communication is spattered with biblical references… and they never seem to go out of fashion, which isn’t the case for most. Speaking of which, Kathryn Lilley of The Kill Zone discovered SaveTheWords.org last weekend, and ended up adopting the word snollygoster.
And finally, some food for thought from 101-year-old Dutch author Hans Keilson. His 1947 novel Comedy in a Minor Key was published in translation in the USA earlier this year, but has just been published in the UK for the first time. A New York Times reviewer hailed Hans as a genius back in August. “Genius?” he mused. “I’m not even a proper writer!”
