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On writing. Caveats: My way is just my way, probably not your way. I hate being taught. I& #39;ve never taken a writing class or read a book on writing. The fun for me is figuring everything out myself. I don& #39;t know the rules of punctuation or grammar. To this day I cannot diagram/
...a sentence or tell you what a participle is. Still not clear WTF a semi-colon is for. So YMMV. 1) First comes: idea. What if this, what if that. 2) Then I sort of mentally weigh the idea: is it a book? Do I really want to write it? Can I sell it? 3) I& #39;ll often write/
...a page or two to sort of & #39;feel& #39; the voice. Is it working? 4) I put together a series bible which has several purposes. It forces me to focus and to make the case, first to myself. But it& #39;s also a sales tool, intended to convince an editor that I know WTF I& #39;m doing./
5) The bible will include a log line, a longer explanation, starting characters (with photos), locations (also w/photos.) Maps. 6) At that point I& #39;m thinking OK, this will work. So I start writing. I write until anxiety builds up telling me I should roll back through, fix stuff/
...I need to fix. 7) It& #39;s a series of long loops: maybe 50 pages, loop back. Another 50, loop back. 8) I generally figure out the ending 30 or so pages from the end. This is where the fear builds. Can I do it? Can I figure it out? 9) I figure it out. The end. 10) At this point/
...I am sick of the damn thing and never want to see it again. I hit & #39;send& #39; and off it goes to my editor. 11) It comes back with notes. I hate this. My goal is always to produce an ms that needs nothing, so any note is a failure. 12) I triage the notes: a) Stupid shit I ignore/
b) Meh shit I kind of do. c) Genuinely useful stuff I do with a degree of enthusiasm. 13) A couple weeks later comes copy edit. I resist the urge to just blanket approve everything and push through it again, but basically approve 90% of copy edits. 14) All done and/
...I never want to look at it again. On to the next job.
