My writing week 2(27)

Hi all,

I am not in the most positive mood at the moment - except for the readers of this blog, I seem to be surrounded by uncaring morons - so it's probably not a great time to be conducting a mid-year review of my writing efforts this year, but here goes anyway.

At the start of the year I wrote:

I want to finish the last three chapters of the first draft of Stalking Tigers. I then want to tidy it up so I can put it out into the critiquing world. While it is being critiqued...I want to rewrite a novel I wrote the first draft of back before I did a few writing courses. Finally, I want to redraft Stalking Tigers after it has been critiqued. I should finish writing the first draft and have time to tidy it up by the end of January. I will then give myself six months, to the end July, to rewrite the other novel. This leaves five months to write a second draft of Stalking Tigers.

James Spader as a barman in some obscure movie said: How do you make God laugh? Make a plan. Ha Huh. I did finish the first draft of Stalking Tigers, but it was more like five chapters and 25,000 words, and it took me to sometime in March, if I recall correctly. Since then I have been editing it, but what was supposed to be just a structural/grammar/punctuation/consistency edit has turned into very much changed second drafting. I have redrafted the first five and half chapters, or 30,000 words, with about 100,000 to go.

At the rate I am going it will take me to the end of the year to finish it, which isn't good enough. My output must increase. Rather than some arbitrary word limit, I will give myself a major deadline of 28th September to finish it. With weekly deadlines of a chapter a week to start with, building up to two chapters a week, so I finish the whole redrafting in 12 weeks.

So the plan is:

chapters 6-12 by the 2nd August
chapters 13-21 by the 30th August
chapters 22-28 by the 28th of September

I can hear God laughing again, and I'm an atheist.

Graham.

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