My writing week (27)

Hi all,

I am three thousand words into chapter eighteen, currently one of my characters is hiding and I am having trouble getting the other character to find her. As soon as I find her, that should be the end of the chapter. But it looks like I have added another chapter to the novel because a lot of other things were supposed to happen in this chapter. The novel is 86,000 words and growing.

I did my first critique of a short story for a while. I didn't like the story at all. It got off to a bad start as the author had mislabelled it science-fiction when the only genre it fell into was thriller. It was another one of those revenge stories, like half the movies coming out of America. I'm sick of watching them, I certainly don't want to read them. The characters all seemed very immature too as I wondered if the author had issues with women. I probably wrote the most negative sounding critique, mainly around the plot, that I have written, but the author seemed to take it okay, judging from an email I got from him.

I've nearly finished reading the fantasy epic that has been occupying most of my limited reading time for the past few months. When finished, I will be only reading short books for a while.

A couple of quotes on writing that I read in The Age last week. From Stephen King: "Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word". I only use a thesaurus when searching for replacements for a word I have overused. Kurt Vonnegut's first rule of writing: "Do not use semicolons...all they do is show you've been to college." I use semicolons, I haven't been to college, but I have been to university.

Graham.

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