• Writing Resources

    Novel. Is. Sent.

    So I submitted my novel proposal yesterday. Quite excited, first time I’ve subbed a novel in over ten years (while busy at BioWare I really didn’t feel I had the time to write novels, focused instead on short stories). For the novel I choose a publisher that accepted electronic submissions (print will come next, if needed but wanted to avoid the expense if I could), was considered a SFWA accepted market and has published books that are similar to what I’ve written. Will submit to other markets once I return from the Writers of the Future event, just wanted to get one submission out the door before that. I will…

  • Writing Resources

    Adverb Hunter

    Thought I had posted this earlier but couldn’t find it. I’m about halfway through doing revisions to the novel (proofreading, improving phrasing, that sort of thing). Over at yourothermind.com (my software for writers blog) I noted that I had added a simple adverb detection system to YOM a few months ago. And then promptly forgot about it. Well in the course of doing the novel edits I have started using it. And I wasn’t expecting much from it. Wow was I wrong. It seems I am an insidious (ab)user of adverbs. I sprinkle them profusely throughout my writing. In a 4000 word chapter I have removed as many as 40…

  • Writing Resources

    Finishing the first Novel

    Well I am nearing the finish line on the novel! The last third is going a lot faster than the previous sections though I suspect that has more to do with these chapters being more complete after the first draft than any newfound skill on my part. See, when I wrote the first draft I didn’t really know where everything was going until I hit the last third of the novel. At the point I really understood what was going on and of course this realization meant that much of what I had written in the first twenty chapters had to be changed. And heavily. So it looks like I…

  • My Life

    Novel Progress

    I announce most of my novel progress through twitter but thought I’d do an actual quick post summarizing things. I am writing the second draft of the novel, the middle bits having turned out to be a complete rewrite with the beginning and ending looking like they will stay close to the original draft. I’m on Chapter 18 of what will be twenty seven or twenty eight chapters and sitting at 70 000 words. I want to end up around one hundred thousand words but we’ll see, it looks like it might go a little long. I think I will probably start shopping it around in early July and begin…

  • My Life

    Birth of a social network – Empire Avenue

    It has now been several months since I first started participating in the beta for Empire Avenue. I was a latecomer to Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter so I’ve never really been in the position of watching a network unfold before. Just watching the newcomers list and seeing where they are signing in from has been kind of fun as the network grew out of Edmonton and Montreal and spread all over the place — many users in the States and overseas now. (p.s at some point I’d love to see a time-lapse video showing the spread). What’s been good Since share value is determined by online activity I am more…

  • My Life,  Writing Resources

    Creating an ePub File

    I’ve passed the 25% mark on the second draft of the novel. As I mentioned previously I am writing the novel using a simple markup language that I can then ‘export’ to Word. However I realized that most of the time I am then converting the Word document to an eBook for my reader’s reading and so decided to add an ‘export to epub’ option to my exporter. It was both very simple and very difficult. The exporter takes the novel text and then breaks it into chapters, autonumbering them and doing other nice things that will save me work later on. I then add the epub file to Calibre.…

  • Writing Resources

    Done!

    With 4700 words, the first draft of my novel is finished. It ended up at 108000 words, a little long as I’ve noted before but I’ll have it below 100k for the final draft. Most of the writing happened after January, so not bad output for three months. I had planned to be finished in February though. The draft is rougher than I had intended setting out but I learned a lot. I’m taking a break from it to work on several short stories and start planning the second novel (a rewrite of an urban fantasy novel I started writing back in college). In May I’ll start work on the…

  • Writing Resources

    One more chapter to go!

    Wrote a bit over 4000 words today. I have only one chapter left to go and my first draft of my first novel is finished. In slightly less good news the novel is now over a hundred thousand words in length. I’m going to be trying to remove a lot during the second draft as I’d really love to keep this thing under a hundred thousand.

  • Writing Resources

    Word Progress so Far

    Since the beginning of the year I’ve set myself some firm word count goals and to my delight I’ve been able to meet and often exceed them. I took a quick look at my tracking and I’ve now written over 75 000 words since January. The bulk of this has been on the novel but I’ve (almost) finished a 12 000 word sci-fi story and the rough draft of a flash story. If I can keep this pace I should be able to finish the rough draft of the first novel by the end of March and start on the second novel in April. Of course today I’m derailed from…