I've been chipping away at Writ in Blood pretty consistently for the last month or so, almost always hitting the two-chapters-a-day goal. I missed a weekend here or there, and the Fourth proved fruitless--though filled with explosions, which, y'know, makes up for it--but on the whole I've been pretty consistent.
I'm getting pretty sick of this story, let me just say.
Because I spent time watching the film version of Coriolanus yesterday, I had to make up for it by working all the way up to midnight in order to hit the two-chapters-a-day minimum. Why does it take so long, you ask? And even if you didn't, I'll pretend that you did, since that's what I wanted to document today.
Taking it in manageable chunks is one of the reasons that I'm set up the way that I have described. If I push through until I get bored, I would have a day or two of frantic work and then a week or two in between that would see no effort on it at all. Manic-depressive methods may have worked for Van Gogh, but they don't for me. So I have to have reasonable, doable, and still effective expectations.
The next reason why it takes me so long to do each chapter is that my book has been peer reviewed. Or, rather, half of my book has been peer reviewed. My writer's group has been hammering away on this story, a chapter at a time, for two and a half years. They are almost to chapter 50 (out of 85). Though it varies a little, there are hundreds of words of feedback and notes on each chapter that I have to take into account. That's a lot of reading, plus I'm reading the chapter itself as I go along.
The image above shows part of how I do this. By using Opera, I can open up to three tabs in the same window, then tile them vertically. Then I fullscreen each tab to get the set up you see here. This allows me to have three comments next to each other, all from different people, yet of the same story. Additionally, I don't have to worry about trying to get all of the comments into one document and seeing their comments together, as I have OpenOffice and it just doesn't want to do that. So it's the best option a poor boy like me has.
Anyway, with the three responses laid out like that, I can see their responses pretty much in tandem. Now, I have other resources that I have to look at--a fourth (and sometimes fifth) member of the group may have comments too, and then there are general notes that I took when we discussed the chapter as a group. To address those issues, I simply look at who has the fewest comments, read all of those at once to see what I can get from them, and then close the window. Then I look over my notes--which usually encapsulates everything I'm about to read--and use that as a basic guide for my revision. Scrolling down, I try to find specific areas that the reviewer mentioned, read the context, and decide how to use his/her criticism.
It is, quite frankly, really laborious. It's rewarding, however, to see how people's opinions shift--sometimes within the chapter itself--and their expectations change. Some readers so accurately predict what I'm writing--or, on the other hand, so accurately understand what's there--that I'm a little shocked. Then I get to parts that include twists they didn't foresee and I get to revel in their expressions of dismay and/or disgust.
So that's my process. I listen to music on Spotify (since I'm not writing, I can listen to rock music and stuff with lyrics in it, which is a nice change from the symphonic things I've been listening to almost exclusively since January 2010), read over everything, make appropriate adjustments, and mark up every page. Yes, every page of the book has red on it. Some more than others, but I haven't had a single one pass without some deletion, expansion, revision, or edit. I thought I wrote fairly clean copy...but I don't think that anymore.
Anyway, this post was going to be written last night--I've been wanting to document it for a while--but that's just didn't happen. Instead, I took twenty minutes of revision and wrote this, instead! But that's okay. I'm less sick of the book now than when I started the blog, so I should be able to get this done. Oh, and for the record: It takes me about eighty minutes to do a chapter, which means that I need between two and a half and three hours to do my daily edits. Once I'm on my own, however, that will decrease substantially, methinks. I hope: We're going to Disneyland next week and I'd like to be able to do edits in the car without having to worry about the computer--since I would have to upload all of the comments and stuff like that. It'd stink.
Okay. Procrastination = over.
I'm getting pretty sick of this story, let me just say.
Because I spent time watching the film version of Coriolanus yesterday, I had to make up for it by working all the way up to midnight in order to hit the two-chapters-a-day minimum. Why does it take so long, you ask? And even if you didn't, I'll pretend that you did, since that's what I wanted to document today.
Taking it in manageable chunks is one of the reasons that I'm set up the way that I have described. If I push through until I get bored, I would have a day or two of frantic work and then a week or two in between that would see no effort on it at all. Manic-depressive methods may have worked for Van Gogh, but they don't for me. So I have to have reasonable, doable, and still effective expectations.
The next reason why it takes me so long to do each chapter is that my book has been peer reviewed. Or, rather, half of my book has been peer reviewed. My writer's group has been hammering away on this story, a chapter at a time, for two and a half years. They are almost to chapter 50 (out of 85). Though it varies a little, there are hundreds of words of feedback and notes on each chapter that I have to take into account. That's a lot of reading, plus I'm reading the chapter itself as I go along.
The image above shows part of how I do this. By using Opera, I can open up to three tabs in the same window, then tile them vertically. Then I fullscreen each tab to get the set up you see here. This allows me to have three comments next to each other, all from different people, yet of the same story. Additionally, I don't have to worry about trying to get all of the comments into one document and seeing their comments together, as I have OpenOffice and it just doesn't want to do that. So it's the best option a poor boy like me has.
Anyway, with the three responses laid out like that, I can see their responses pretty much in tandem. Now, I have other resources that I have to look at--a fourth (and sometimes fifth) member of the group may have comments too, and then there are general notes that I took when we discussed the chapter as a group. To address those issues, I simply look at who has the fewest comments, read all of those at once to see what I can get from them, and then close the window. Then I look over my notes--which usually encapsulates everything I'm about to read--and use that as a basic guide for my revision. Scrolling down, I try to find specific areas that the reviewer mentioned, read the context, and decide how to use his/her criticism.
It is, quite frankly, really laborious. It's rewarding, however, to see how people's opinions shift--sometimes within the chapter itself--and their expectations change. Some readers so accurately predict what I'm writing--or, on the other hand, so accurately understand what's there--that I'm a little shocked. Then I get to parts that include twists they didn't foresee and I get to revel in their expressions of dismay and/or disgust.
So that's my process. I listen to music on Spotify (since I'm not writing, I can listen to rock music and stuff with lyrics in it, which is a nice change from the symphonic things I've been listening to almost exclusively since January 2010), read over everything, make appropriate adjustments, and mark up every page. Yes, every page of the book has red on it. Some more than others, but I haven't had a single one pass without some deletion, expansion, revision, or edit. I thought I wrote fairly clean copy...but I don't think that anymore.
Anyway, this post was going to be written last night--I've been wanting to document it for a while--but that's just didn't happen. Instead, I took twenty minutes of revision and wrote this, instead! But that's okay. I'm less sick of the book now than when I started the blog, so I should be able to get this done. Oh, and for the record: It takes me about eighty minutes to do a chapter, which means that I need between two and a half and three hours to do my daily edits. Once I'm on my own, however, that will decrease substantially, methinks. I hope: We're going to Disneyland next week and I'd like to be able to do edits in the car without having to worry about the computer--since I would have to upload all of the comments and stuff like that. It'd stink.
Okay. Procrastination = over.
Comments