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Hi all, For most days last week I performed all the writerly things that I think a writer should do. I wrote, edited, critiqued and read nearly every day. I also managed to write a couple of blog posts including a book review, joined in an online discussion about the proposed new 12 month rule for imported books, and kept up to date with what was going on in the world by reading The Age. Now I just need to spend more time writing, editing, critiquing and reading. I am still fiddling with the last chapter of Stalking Tigers . It has failed its editing diet, gaining 2,000 words, and now sits at 7,200 words, which is a bit long so I might have to try and split it into two chapters. At this rate the novel will have reached an obese 180,000 words by the time I have finished editing it. I critiqued a story for critters.com and another for a friend, while reading the rules for the OWWW workshop and also notes on how they like their pieces critiqued. Their notes on ...

The Elves of Cintra is the second book in the three book Genesis of Shannara series by Terry Brooks. It is probably classified as young adult because the majority of the characters are teenagers, and the series has as its overarching theme that adults destroyed the Earth, so it is up to children/teens to save it. A review in The Age o f the first book in the series, Children of Armageddon , caught my interest. As readers of this blog would be aware, I am a fan of apocalyptic fiction, so a novel set in an environmentally and technologically ravaged US was bound to catch my attention. The review suggested the book was slipstream – a combination of fantasy and science-fiction - but I have come to the conclusion that the series is fantasy, tending towards high fantasy, with guns replacing swords. As in the first book, the second novel’s action is split between a number of different groups who are destined, if they survive, to meet up somewhere in the third book. There is a group of home...

Hi all, I've started editing Stalking Tigers and it seems it is going to take a while. I spent last week fiddling around with the last chapter and actually added to its 6,000 words, not a good thing when one of my prime objectives is to get the word count of the novel down from its 130,000 words to something like 100,000. It would seem that editing, for me anyway, needs longer continual sessions than writing so I can ensure there is consistency within scenes and chapters. I will have to change the way I allocate time to writing. I critiqued another story last week. This one had problems with its flow because of a combination of made up nouns, oddly constructed sentences and overuse of a thesaurus. The ideas were okay. I finished reading The Elves of Cintra , by Terry Brooks, the second book in the Genesis of Shannara series. I thought it was a better book than the first, which was mostly set-up. The second was also better written. I hope to post a review of it later this week. If...

Hi all, I've finished the first draft of Stalking Tigers , yaaaaa me. At 129,000 words, it's strange how it ended up at a similar length to the my 126,000 word draft of I'll Just Sit Here and Watch. I am now doing an edit and polish before sending it off to be critiqued. I have no idea how long the edit and polish will take. The first 10,000 words should be relatively okay because that section was originally a novella which I had critiqued by a few people and then changed and edited a few times. After that, the next 50,000 words saw me stop at the end of a chapter and go back and edit it, while for the last 60,000 words I only did a bit of editing here and there. So perhaps I should try to get through the first 60,000 words in a couple of weeks and then make some sort of assessment of how long the rest will take after doing a couple of its chapters. I have a few things I want to do while editing. First, I want to try and ensure that every chapter has...

Hi all, Nearly there: I feel I could be writing the final words to the first draft of Stalking Tigers any day now. I found some more loose ends that I reckon can be knotted very quickly. Today, my doctor told me that I had an iron deficiency, which might explain why I have been feeling hopelessly tired at the end of each day recently. I hope some iron supplements will wake me up and get me writing more. I have used part of my anticipated stimulus cheque from the government to pay for my membership to Aussiecon 4. For those who are unaware it is the World Science Fiction Convention ( Worldcon ) and is coming to Melbourne in September 2010. I have never been to a science fiction convention, so I thought I might as well begin with the biggest one there is. You can become a friend of Aussiecon 4 on Facebook and they have a website. I finally critiqued a story after finding that critters.com had reset my weeks/critiques ratio. Problem is they did it four weeks ago wi...

Hi all, My word count improved last week to 3,400 words, but I am still yet to write 5,000 words in a week this year. I am going to set up a excel spreadsheet of my weekly word count so I can see how much more I have to write to average 5,000 words per week for the year. One positive thing to come out of my weeks writing is that I feel the end of the novel is very close as there is only one more thing that the reader needs to know. I spent far too much time deleting emails as a religion v science debate broke out on one of the writing message boards that sends me emails. Having watched a few of these debates in the past I find then mostly useless, as the most ardent participants don't want their opinion to evolve. In previous posts I have mentioned the large word counts of other writers, last Saturday's Age had a story about Australian author Eva Hornung whose...