Midnight’s Dawning
I jump around a bit in this blog because it’s interesting to contrast my attitudes of today with that naïve, optimistic, hopeful writer from over thirty years ago. Writing about him, I miss him, and the idealism he nurtured. But it wasn’t all hopefulness. Sometimes, reality snuck in to temper the enthusiasm. As occurred after I finished my novel. I started wondering why a publisher would take a chance on an unknown, untried author who’d only written book one of a proposed four-book series. A big part of this concern was genuine self-doubt. An equally big part was just how clueless I was about what to do next. I decided…
Typewriter Mania
I have no idea how long my handwritten novel is. One A5 exercise book is 240 pages. I average about fifteen words a line, and there’s twenty-five lines per page. That would mean there’s roughly 90,000 words in that book. I made it halfway through the second exercise book, which would make that first draft (not counting the annotated material) about 135,000 words. Given how scrappy it was, given the notes scribbled on inside covers, given it had taken writing a book to work out the story, I knew I had to rewrite it from word one (even if you could do something with a hideously handwritten novel). Moving up…
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