Tag: #amediting

NANOWRIMO Day Ten

I didn’t take very long to finish off my quota of words today, and with the spare time, I decided to go back over the plan and see how the second half of the book is holding up in accordance with the plan.

Despite the misgivings I had in becoming a planner for this exercise, it had proved a good idea, particularly when you have to write a certain numberof words a day to reach the target.

Last year, it was a pantzer effort, and I know, at times, I struggled with continuity, and found myself having to backtrack when plot changes required earlier intervention.

Writing as a pantzer is much more viable when you have a much longer time to write the story, like a whole year, because I find I sometimes get only so far, and I nedto thinkabput the next step.

Today I’ve taken the time to translate all of the notes for the forthcoming chapters into a bound notebook, with several pages for each of the chapters, allowing for a number of possible later changes.

I now feel I’m in a better place to continue.

Saturday has come and gone

Although the main reason for its existence is to follow Friday, in some cases, it is the first day of the weekend.

Once upon a time, Saturday used to be a working day, you know, those days when we worked a 48 hour week.  Then it became a 44 hour week and we only worked in the morning.

As time progressed, we started working 40 hour weeks and had both Saturday and Sunday off.  Sunday, of course, was always a non-starter.  The church made sure you were able to go to church on Sunday.

As time progressed, weekends started to begin on a Friday, with the day in question being granted by employers as a Rostered Day Off, provided you made up the time during the preceding two week period.

Now it seems the standing joke is we should work weekends, and have the week off.  Odd, it hasn’t quite caught on yet.

But, as usual, I digress…

After a week that got out of control, Saturday was supposed to pull it back into some sort of shape.  In a sense, it happened.  I looked at that list of things I had to do, picked one and got on with it.

PI Walthenson is now about to get a second case, as intimated at the end of his first, involving not only the search for his missing father, but also the search for those who kidnapped him.

That done, I moved onto the helicopter story, otherwise titled ‘What happens after writing an action-packed start’, and I have been researching and making notes for the third section of this story, starting at episode 31, and it looks like we’re going back to Africa, and the remoter part of the Democratic Republic of Congo to rescue the two agents he failed to the first time.

And it is NaNoWriMo time, and I have to keep the writing project going, a story tentatively entitled Betrayal.

With that, there is the upkeep of the blog.  I never thought maintaining material for a blog would be so hard.

But…

Now I can say last week wasn’t a total disaster.

And, tomorrow the Maple Leafs are playing.  Can’t wait.

Being Inspired – the book

Over the past year or so I have been selecting photographs I’ve taken on many travels, and put a story to them.

When I reached a milestone of 50 stories, I decided to make them into a book, and, in doing so, I have gone through each and revised them, making some longer and into short stories.

50 photographs, 50 stories.  I’ve called it, “Inspiration, Maybe”

It will be available soon.

InspirationMaybe1v1

The first case of PI Walthenson – “A Case of Working With the Jones Brothers”

This case has everything, red herrings, jealous brothers, femme fatales, and at the heart of it all, greed.

Coming soon!

PIWalthJones1

Past conversations with my cat – 22

20160917_075223

This is Chester. He spends a lot of time looking out this window.

He’s keeping an eye of the birds outside.

Or, more to the point, he’s selecting the one he’s going to present to me on the back doorstep.

He missed the briefing when I told him that it was not the cat’s job to catch birds just keep them from eating my lawn seed.

Seems his natural instincts trump my instructions

No problem.

He can’t go outside.

Sorry. Not sorry!

In a word: Peer

It’s not exactly a good word these days, as it has a sinister connotation, much like the word gay, the meaning of which as we know today has nothing to do with what it meant in the past.

Peering at someone could be inferred as looking at someone in a manner that makes them feel uncomfortable.

But, in another sense,  to peer is to look at someone or something with difficulty or without concentration.

A peer can be someone of equal age or social standing as you.

Then there’s peer pressure which is the desire by younger people to be the same as others of the same age or social status.  And it could lead to underage smoking or drinking to fit it with others.

This is not to be confused with the word pier, which is one of the large or small structures that jut out into the sea, the more notable are at Brighton, and Blackpool.

Sometimes you can tie a boat up.

It can also be a tall structure that holds up part of a floor, or roof.

“The Things We Do For Love” – Coming soon

Is love the metaphorical equivalent to ‘walking the plank’; a dive into uncharted waters?

For Henry the only romance he was interested in was a life at sea, and when away from it, he strived to find sanctuary from his family and perhaps life itself.  It takes him to a small village by the sea, s place he never expected to find another just like him, Michelle, whom he soon discovers is as mysterious as she is beautiful.

Henry had long since given up the notion of finding romance, and Michelle couldn’t get involved for reasons she could never explain, but in the end both acknowledge that something happened the moment they first met.  

Plans were made, plans were revised, and hopes were shattered.

A chance encounter causes Michelle’s past to catch up with her, and whatever hope she had of having a normal life with Henry, or anyone else, is gone.  To keep him alive she has to destroy her blossoming relationship, an act that breaks her heart and shatters his.

But can love conquer all?

It takes a few words of encouragement from an unlikely source to send Henry and his friend Radly on an odyssey into the darkest corners of the red light district in a race against time to find and rescue the woman he finally realizes is the love of his life.

The cover, at the moment, looks like this:

lovecoverfinal1

NANOWRIMO eve

I’m ready, finally, to set sail.

It was touch and go with the preparations almost foundering on the rocky shoreline that represented the plot holes, and in the end, I put all of the plot lines on cards and blue tacked them to the wall in the order I expected they would play out, and it showed where the holes were.

It was an innovative idea, sadly not my own, but one I used many years ago when working as principal researcher for a company biography, a company that had been in business since the 1890s. Inthat instance, I collated the main points attached to dates, sorted the cards m into date order and it gave a very clear historical outline.

The same, I found worked for the plot, and in being able to attach a loose timeline across all of the plots and sub plots to see where, chapter wise, they were going to fit in. Or where something was missing.

I know there’s probably very good computer software that also does this, but I was getting distressed, and didn’t want to put it all into a program, and find it didn’t do the job quite as i might expect, and being so close to starting time I didn’t have the time to fiddle.

Call me a luddite, but what did we do before computers. Yes. Pencils and paper.

Or was that charcoal and papyrus?

Where does time go?

NaNoWriMo starts in a few days time and I thought I had it under control, the preparatory work that is.

Nothing could be further than the truth.

I was looking at the outline last night, and it was as if I had the finished book in my hands and I was doing the second reading, part of the endless editing process.

Plot holes bigger than sink holes were appearing before my eyes.

The start is, quite frankly, lame.

There something missing in the middle and there seems some disjointed writing that seems to have no relevance to anything before, so..

Back to the drawing board and …

Panic.

What I need is some thing to hook the reader from page one, not put them to sleep.

OMG.

How the hell am I going to get this mess into some sort of shape before the start.

I guess there’s no time like the present.

Being Inspired – the book

Over the past year or so I have been selecting photographs I’ve taken on many travels, and put a story to them.

When I reached a milestone of 50 stories, I decided to make them into a book, and, in doing so, I have gone through each and revised them, making some longer and into short stories.

50 photographs, 50 stories.  I’ve called it, “Inspiration, Maybe”

It will be available soon.

InspirationMaybe1v1