Catching up

I've been quiet this week. I'd like to say it's because I've been preparing my A-Z challenge posts but, uh, no. (More on that in a moment). I have been trying to get a few things wrapped up before the mayhem begins on Sunday though. I watched The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo last week and it was enough to get me started reading the trilogy I've had since Christmas. I finished the last one last night and, although I thought they could have done with a serious edit, (really I don't care about all the specs of Lisbeth's laptop, just tell me it was 'top-of-the-range), I was hooked enough to read them one after the other. Yeah, that's my review.

I also went to see The Hunger Games at the cinema with the girls on Tuesday. I thought the last time I went to the cinema was to see Rugrats go Wild but the girls reminded me that I took them to see Nanny McPhee. That was in 2005, so going on Tuesday was a big deal. I would happily have waited for the DVD but it was lovely for the three of us to do something together. I was pleasantly surprised that, including us, there were only twelve people watching. I don't do well in crowds, so that helped me relax. As for the film, I thought it was okay. My biggest disappointment was the scene with the dogs. I'll say no more because of spoilers, but you probably know what I mean. On the plus side, there was nobody who I thought shouldn't have been playing the part they had. The stand-out for me was the girl playing Clove. I thought she was fantastic.

I had a great deal of trouble choosing a theme for the A to Z challenge so I'm going with … no theme. Big surprise, huh? I've got a few things written for other themes I was going to do (flash fiction, eighties stuff), so I'll still use those, but sometimes it might be pictures or other bits and pieces I've found. The only thing that hasn't changed since I signed up is the first post – it's a very easy one for me :-)

I've sent off the first chapter of one of the stories I'm revising to two different people for a critique. I'm plodding on with the rest of the work, so I'm happy with how that's going. I've also had an awesome idea for a new story, but I'm not quite sure how it's going to work, so I've written some notes and am just waiting for it to ferment some more.

To the nice people who have been inviting me to Google+ this week, I'm not ignoring you, I'm not on Google +. Thanks for asking though :-)

There will be a Musical Impression tomorrow, it's a special celebration one, so I hope you come back and share a friend's good news!

How has your week been?

Insecure Writer's Support Group 5

It's the first Wednesday in the month, which means it's time for the Insecure Writer's Support Group to come to order. So, what insecurities are plaguing me this month?

I think I might have made a mistake and over-estimated how good I actually am at this writing thing. Not the writing itself, I'm not amazing at it, but I can write stories that (usually) make sense, that have a beginning, a middle and an end. It's what comes afterwards that I'm having the problems with, the editing.

I know lots of people have difficulties with this, they read and they learn and they work through it. I've read, I'm learning, I'm taking advice and I still can't get it right. I had some brilliant feedback from someone about the story I'm working on but, no matter how I try, I can't seem to make the changes in a way that makes sense. I'm now at the point where I dread opening up the damn document. I just want to start the first draft of something new and forget this one exists. But I've done that, four times. I promised myself that 2012 would be the year I finally got something 'finished'.

I'm actually not as bothered by this as I was a few weeks ago. I'm beginning to resign myself to the fact that I might never finish something. Is it the end of the world if I just write story after story, first drafts, all of them? I never expected to make any money from my writing, so perhaps this is where it ends, a whole bunch of ideas sitting on my computer. I'll still be writing.

Insecure Writer's Support Group 3

It's time for this month's post for the Insecure Writer's Support Group. Thanks, as ever, to Alex Cavanaugh for putting this together. Here are the participants if you'd like to read more.

So, what am I thinking about this month? If you read my last post, you already know my feelings about editing. This is kind of an extension of that.

I'm not sure I actually have a full length novel in me.

Before I started my first novel, I assumed I would write long and have to delete thousands of words. At school, my stories were always longer than everyone else's. At uni, my essays were double the length they needed to be. I used to cut and paste them. I mean, literally. I would cut paragraphs up, move them around and stick them onto paper. My dissertation, which had a 16k limit, started life at 40k words. So I resigned myself to having to kill a lot of darlings.

I wish. I've written four stories, (I can't bring myself to call them novels), ranging from 36,000 to 55,000 words. I know there is stuff that needs to be added, but there's stuff that needs to be removed too. I think my problem is that, whilst I have good ideas for main plots, I don't have sub-plots. I tell myself to concentrate on the stories and not to worry about the length, but if I do that then I feel like I'm giving up on publication. Which isn't so bad, publication still seems like pie in the sky to me right now anyway, but then I feel like a fraud, being here with all of you, having this blog.

Perhaps these are just not the right stories, but I love them. In the right hands, I think they could be really good. If only they were longer.

Starting with the basics

Now that NaNoWriMo is finished, it's time to turn my mind back to editing. I had just started to edit one of my stories at the end of October, and I thought that I would continue that whilst writing something else. I realised very quickly that it wasn't going to happen. Still, another month of leaving it to sit won't have hurt it at all.

I'm after some recommendations, if any of you have any, as to some good books that might help with the editing process. I've got a ton of posts from around the web, saved in my editing folder but, faced with a mass of my words, I'm really struggling to know how to do this. I know that you should leave the small stuff until last. What's the use of correcting punctuation and deleting adjectives if you're going to rewrite great swathes of the story? Still, it's those little things that I find myself focusing on because I'm not exactly sure how to go about fixing the big picture.

What's frustrating me is that sometimes I'm sure there's a good story buried among the rubble, I'm just not sure how to find it. I'm scared I'm going to end up as one of those people who just write story after story, and never edit any of them. I have four now, and not one of them has had a proper edit. To steal someone else's analogy, I've painted all the bedrooms before I've built the staircases. Can anyone help me with a good carpenter?