Process

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24 entries. 12,329 words.

April, 2012

  • Meta Writing. 2012-04-04 9:26 PM.
    • Process
    • Tel
    • everettrenshaw.com

    So I thought I would start writing a bit about what I’m writing. Get it? Meta-writing! It occurred to me that somebody out there might actually be curious about the process of writing, or the process of becoming a writer, and since I happen to be in the position of “aspiring writer,” perhaps somebody else could benefit from my experiences. I know I would want to read something like that from another aspiring writer. 900 words.
  • Vence hires a mercenary. 2012-04-05 9:45 PM.
    • Process
    • Tel
    • everettrenshaw.com

    Another meta writing post. Yesterday I finally finished a scene between Vence, Ril, and Ali inside the castle. I know you don’t know who those people are, but I’ll get back to them. Chronologically, it is the most recent part of the story, but I kept stopping in the middle and going back to write other scenes, because frankly I’m not precisely sure how all these pieces are going to fit together so that Elenora can retake the castle. (This despite having written a nice outline for the whole story, which has been utterly useless after I passed the halfway point.) Anyway that was about 500 words, which I wrote in bits and pieces during the day. 465 words.
  • Poison and Pain. 2012-04-06 10:55 PM.
    • Process
    • Tel
    • everettrenshaw.com

    In the continuing adventures of authoring The Sovereign of Tel: First I wrote about Vence, who had infiltrated the castle, starting his plan to weaken it from the inside. First he had Ali (the cook) add some poison to the food supplies going to the castle soldiers, then, after dark, he dumped a bunch of poison into the castle’s well. When I’m writing about medieval life, I worry a lot about “getting things right.” So when I put an indoor well into this castle, I wasn’t sure if actual castles had indoor wells, even though, to me, it seems like a pretty logical thing to do. If you’re building a castle to withstand sieges for months on end, you would need to have some supply of water inside the castle walls, right? So why not build it inside the keep so it would be super convenient? I couldn’t think of any reason this couldn’t be done with 14th century technology. I found a few references to castle wells in my primary research sources (Google), so I feel pretty good about that bit. 741 words.
  • Rescue In Progress. 2012-04-07 11:50 AM.
    • Process
    • Tel
    • everettrenshaw.com

    Only wrote 800 words yesterday, which still put me 500 words over my 5-day goal. Most of those words went into the continuation of Vence’s subversive mission to bring down the castle. After poisoning the well, his next goal is to rescue Hayden and three Metherel cousins from the prison. (Except when he gets to the prison, only the three cousins are there. Mila took Hayden upstairs the day before.) The two guards at the prison are easily dispatched, so now he’s ready to open the cell doors. Not much to say about it, really, except I thought the guards were a little too easily dispatched (but really, they deserved it, since they were not paying attention). I might go back and make it a little harder in a revision. 130 words.
  • Burning Grain, New Characters, and Names. 2012-04-08 1:23 PM.
    • Process
    • Tel
    • everettrenshaw.com

    Yesterday’s writing: Vence rescued the Metherel cousins from the castle prison. Of course, as planned, he was caught in the process. Then I started a new chapter from Mila’s POV, where Lord Garret receives the news that someone has poisoned his troops, burned up his food stores, and freed his prisoners. He goes to have a chat with Vence, now a prisoner. There’s another “getting things right” issue I worry about here. Does flour burn? :) I have no idea. I’m just assuming that if you dump lamp oil on a bunch of sacks of flour and grain and then set them on fire, they would actually burn. I seem to recall stories of grain silos exploding, and I think they did something like that in Mythbusters. I’m also making the possibly bold assumption that a fire would actually burn for a while inside a closed stone room inside a castle. 488 words.
  • An Unintended Day Off. 2012-04-09 11:27 PM.
    • Process
    • everettrenshaw.com

    Yesterday was an epic fail of a writing day, the biggest failure in recent memory. I suppose I could lie and say I was too busy with Easter festivities, but the truth is that I didn’t do anything special and in fact had the same amount of time for writing that I always do on Sundays. I managed to write a single sentence during the day. Actually, I wrote two versions of the same sentence. (Because someone asked, that sentence was: “Mila thought the man deserved a beating for displaying such insolence in front of the sovereign.”) Then, around 9:00 pm, I buckled down to put 2,000 words on the page before bed no matter what … and got through about 100 words before giving up for the night. 215 words.
  • Monday Meta (4/9/2012). 2012-04-10 9:42 PM.
    • Process
    • Tel
    • everettrenshaw.com

    Not much to say about yesterday’s writing. I worked on another “beginning” scene, from Ordicus Metherel’s POV the night he falls into a coma, which sort of sets the whole book into motion. I am still not happy with it, so the search for a way to start this book continues. (This one fails because there is too much information delivered. It’s really frickin’ hard to introduce a new world in a way that doesn’t overwhelm the reader.) 148 words.
  • Subject-less Sentences. 2012-04-16 11:28 PM.
    • Writing
    • Process
    • everettrenshaw.com

    I noticed another little trick Suzanne Collins used to pull readers along at breakneck speed in The Hunger Games. I hadn’t noticed it in the first two books, but I saw it often in Mockingjay, the last book. She often clips the subjects off of sentences, especially in scenes of intense action or confusion. For example, she might take a paragraph like this: I walk into the room. I open the curtains. Then I put some clothes in the washing machine. 199 words.
  • The Sovereign of Tel Draft Completed. 2012-04-22 11:54 AM.
    • News
    • Process
    • Tel
    • everettrenshaw.com

    Okay, here’s the sitch. I have finished what could loosely be defined as a “first draft” of The Sovereign of Tel. (Although, technically, it is the third draft of the March project. It’s hard to define these things. The first revision might not count since it was a totally different story and world.) Now I face the same dilemma I had after I finished a draft of Kubak Outpost. I’ve imported everything into Scrivener for Windows, which, sadly, is the best thing out there for novel management on Windows, as far as I can tell. So now I can look at the draft from a very high level for the first time. (I used WriteMonkey during the actual writing.) 259 words.

December, 2012

  • Outlining The Rest of Airworld. 2012-12-13 2:34 AM.
    • Writing
    • Process
    • everettrenshaw.com

    I’ve not forgotten about Airworld. I’m outlining the remainder of the story. I find that I can only be a pantser up to a certain point (usually that point is about now, where the story needs to start moving toward a resolution), at which time I really have to sit down and figure out how to resolve things without using magical faery dust. In this case it’s harder than I might have expected, because Airworld became rather complex, and there are many threads flying about loose right now. I suppose this is why writers always advise you to know your ending before you start. It’s good advice, but extremely difficult for me. Unless you count something like, “Then they figured everything out. The end.” 399 words.

January, 2013

  • What Would a Professional Do. 2013-01-06 12:20 AM.
    • Writing
    • Process
    • everettrenshaw.com

    So yeah, I’m still stuck on Airworld. The main obstacle I think is my complete lack of confidence in the outline I have sketched out for the rest of the book. It sounds like it will be terrible. Nothing makes sense, nobody is anywhere for a reason, entire plotlines are pointless and stupid. And what’s worse, according to my 3-books-a-year schedule, I should be starting a new book in February. That’s less than a month away, if you’re somehow unable to look at a calendar. 456 words.
  • Dissecting What Went Wrong. 2013-01-16 1:35 AM.
    • Writing
    • Process
    • everettrenshaw.com

    In the continuing saga of what to do with Airworld, I believe I have figured out why I don’t particularly want to continue it. Somewhere along the way, the story stopped being fun to write. It seems pretty obvious in retrospect. If it was fun to write, obviously I’d still be writing it. But what happened? This exact thing was something that Rachel Aaron addressed in her NaNoWriMo question-and-answer thread again and again. She advised not to continue writing something that wasn’t fun. She also advised that you should figure out why it isn’t fun to write, because it probably indicates a problem that needs to be fixed. 296 words.

June, 2013

  • A Minor Variation. 2013-06-03 6:18 PM.
    • Process
    • everettrenshaw.com

    With apologies to Billy Joel. I had a minor revelation for my Airworld story last night. It occurred to me that things would work out much better if the location of the Council of Life is known when we start out. For some reason I had set it in stone that Naobi was leaving Motiva to search for the Council of Life. Now she is leaving to visit the Council of Life. With that minor variation, some other things fall into place nicely. Mainly, it removes “finding the Council of Life” as a condition for ending the story. I was having major problems with the ending because it wasn’t symmetrical with the beginning. 113 words.

August, 2013

  • Page of Scribbling Technique. 2013-08-05 11:57 PM.
    • Writing
    • Process
    • everettrenshaw.com

    Just for posterity, here is a page of scribbling I did trying to block out what I thought would be the final 10,000 words or so of Airworld. What ended up happening is that I raised more questions than I answered, and all the answers started branching off into all these other fairly massive sub-plots. You may also notice there is a whole new, vitally important character in there that was introduced very late in the story. (Just in case I ever do finish the story, I blurred out some spoilers.) 106 words.

October, 2013

  • Silencing Your Inner Editor. 2013-10-25 1:40 PM.
    • Process
    • everettrenshaw.com

    Writing Excuses recently challenged the standard newbie writing advice that you should “silence your inner editor” while writing. Instead, Mary advised that you need only silence your “inner heckler,” while harnessing your “inner editor” to tell you when you need to improve your writing. Personally I think Mary completely missed the mark on this one. (And I got the sense that Brandon wasn’t on board either.) The “inner editor” as I’ve understood it is not so much a heckler as it is someone who is obsessed with good grammar and who is terrified of making a mistake. Such a person will constantly revise and re-revise and re-re-revise every sentence before moving on to the next one. Listening to this editor will result in never finishing a book or never thinking it’s good enough to release. This is not the kind of thing you want to think about, particularly when you’re writing a first draft. 243 words.

November, 2013

  • A Typical Day In The Life Of NaNoWriMo 2013. 2013-11-19 6:57 PM.
    • Writing
    • Process
    • everettrenshaw.com

    Last night I once again approached my NaNoWriMo writing at about 9:00, which is the absolute latest I can possibly start writing with any expectation of getting anything done. Once again I stared at a blank document, not even looking at the previous day’s writing, wondering how on earth I could possibly come up with 1,667 words to write of a story that has no outline. Not just 1,667 words either. I actually need slightly more than 2,000 words a day to catch up again. 553 words.

January, 2014

  • Writing Plans for 2014. 2014-01-02 5:40 PM.
    • Process
    • everettrenshaw.com

    The first week after NaNoWriMo I had to force myself not to write a new story draft because it had become such a habit. The second week it was kind of a relief not to have to write anything, and that terrible story had finally left my brain. In the third week I was anxious to get back to planning or writing something, lest I fall into a not-writing habit. Then came the holidays and the end of the year, and I predictably fell out of the writing habit. 507 words.

March, 2014

  • Sovereignty 1000-word Summary Completed. 2014-03-07 5:08 PM.
    • Writing
    • Process
    • everettrenshaw.com

    FYI, I completed a 1000-word summary of Sovereignty, but I won’t post it here because it’s filled with spoilers, just in case it turns into a real book some day. It’s now abundantly clear that there is no place for my original story in the book. Not even as a side plot. One of the original driving forces for this book was: What if there was a culture of people who bred servants in the same way that we breed pets? The original main character was going to be one of those servants. 460 words.

February, 2015

  • February Status Report. 2015-02-06 4:21 PM.
    • Writing
    • Process
    • everettrenshaw.com

    Perhaps if I update my blog more often, it will inspire me to do more writing, so that I’ll have more to talk about in my blog. So… As February begins, I’m still working on my post-apocalyptic novel that I started in NaNoWriMo 2014. I’m up to about 70,000 words, so you can probably figure out that I’m not writing very fast-typically I only put down about 500 words a night, somewhere around four a five nights out of a week. (I went from 50,000 words in one month to 20,000 words in three two months.) 372 words.

December, 2017

  • NaNoWriMo 2017 Post-Mortem. 2017-12-01 3:48 PM.
    • NaNoWriMo
    • News
    • Process
    • everettrenshaw.com

    Hi! I’m finally back with another writing update. I completed NaNoWriMo again this year, and here’s my assessment of my performance. Summary This year’s novel is code-named “Survey.” It’s a science fiction/fantasy set many thousands of years in the future, in a time after a long war between humans and aliens has finally resulted in a treaty. A human captain leads a ship on a mission to survey a planet, where a lost colony had once been established thousands of years before. They find a struggling pre-Industrial human society, and alien ships in orbit. 1,111 words.
  • The Editing Process. 2017-12-15 3:30 PM.
    • Editing
    • NaNoWriMo
    • Process
    • everettrenshaw.com

    I’m trying an experiment: I’m going to try not to completely abandon the novel I wrote in November. This experiment has failed every year since 2010. NaNoWriMo drafts from 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2016 languish more-or-less in exactly the same state they were in on December 1st. Drafts from 2010 and 2011 have been edited a lot, but remain woefully unsuitable for submission. But this time I have a plan. Well, a first step in a plan, at least, which is better than I’ve ever done before. 679 words.

January, 2018

  • Survey Revisions Continue. 2018-01-17 3:30 PM.
    • Editing
    • Process
    • everettrenshaw.com

    I promised myself I would try to write two writing posts a month. Technically this should be the second one, but it’s actually just the first one. Oh well. While I have not been extremely happy with my progress on editing “Survey,” my 2016 NaNoWriMo project, I have at least *made* progress on it. Last time I described how I was highlighting sections of text that needed attention, and I have more-or-less completed that. 697 words.

March, 2018

  • A Very Morose Writing Update. 2018-03-19 2:14 PM.
    • Writing
    • Process
    • everettrenshaw.com

    # Monday, March 19, 2018 I promised myself that I would write about writing twice a month. The last writing post I published was January 17, over two months ago. Brace yourself for a shocking revelation. My writing is not going well. This could explain why I haven’t been rushing to tell you about it twice a month. I am writing this post in Visual Studio Code, because perhaps it will inspire me. I love VSCode. I am writing in Markdown format, and watching the little preview window on the right-hand side update as I type. It’s very satisfying. 1,277 words.
  • Why Self-Publishing Might Be A Mistake. 2018-03-28 6:09 PM.
    • Writing
    • Process
    • everettrenshaw.com

    Recently I saw a tweet from someone contemplating self-publishing some of their writing. They didn’t sound confident about it. It prompted me to write this post. I’ve thought about this for years, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it was a mistake to self-publish Lute of the Sparrow on Amazon. It was an informative experience, true. But the only thing I really gained from it was the first-hand knowledge and experience of formatting a book for e-publishing. At the time I thought that would be worth something, but in retrospect, it’s not. The process has probably changed entirely since 2011 anyway. 1,515 words.