It took eight days. Eighteen hours, fifteen minutes of writing time. It’s just over 42,000 words long. But the rough draft is done. The rough draft of what? Well, we can get to that in about a year, maybe. But this is the important part: the act of raw creation is complete. Now comes theContinue reading “It’s Not Done Yet”
Tag Archives: editing
I Don’t Care About Commas
My editor/wife yelled at me. A lot. She yelled mostly about commas. “Should this comma be here? It feels right, but is it right? The Chicago Manual of Style doesn’t help!” And then she tore my arm off my body and beat with it, using the flying splashes of blood to form a summoning circleContinue reading “I Don’t Care About Commas”
Writing is like laundry.
Ah, laundry! The never ending cycle! You throw the clothes in the wash… and then the dryer… and then you wear them. (Sometimes you fold them, if you’re civilized.) And then… back in the wash! Yes, the circle of life! And it’s a lot like writing. Well, kind of. See, when you’re preparing a bookContinue reading “Writing is like laundry.”
We don’t need those fifty pages!
We encamped that night at Garion Danwsbrook. And so began the saga that would become The Keeper of Tales. I mentioned a few weeks ago that what I first wrote evolved quite a bit through revisions. In fact, the first fifty pages are simply gone in what you’ll have the opportunity to read starting MarchContinue reading “We don’t need those fifty pages!”
Who needs sanity?
Last week I wrote about how writing is the beginning of the work. This week I lived it out. I got back a novel I’d written from an editor. The novel isn’t short; the thing was about 600 pages long. The editor left on average three notes a page. Some of the notes regarded typos.Continue reading “Who needs sanity?”
Jonathon Mast: Author 