Twenty

Posted at 19:43:00 on Sat, October 28th 2006 by graham
in: editing novel writing

313 / 333 (94.0%)

I'm procrastinating, but I think I'm allowed to procrastinate just a little. I have but twenty pages of manuscript left before the first pass edits are done on the project-formerly-known-as-Muse (let's just call it The Novel and have done with it; I haven't got a damn clue what title I'm actually going to imbue it with), which I have every intention of getting through tomorrow morning. If that works then I might try to get a story written for Halloween (natch) or Samhain (same date, different slant on the story). At the moment, the story I've got in mind might be more suited for the latter. The Novel is, to be brutally, soul-rendingly honest, a mess. There are many bits of it that are cohesive, but for every one of those there's a bit that's so far out on its own it doesn't even register as part of the story. It needs a lot of work, and I don't see myself starting on Novel The Second until the new year (at least). I'm going to take a break from the manuscript for a few days, but I'll come back to it soon enough, if only because I hate leaving things half finished. It's as though I've got half a novel in the manuscript, mixed in with muck and dirt and muddy water. It's a bit like looking at a mirror buried in a peat bog; all I have to do is scrape away the crap and I'll be left with something like the shards of a good story. After that it'll be a case of finding the literary equivalent of Aryldite (which sadly doesn't have a Wikipedia entry) to join all the bits together. As I've said before, it feels like I'm going about this all the wrong way round, writing the story and then taking it apart and rewriting it again... Assorted clever writers would be spinning in their grave. But this has always been a learning curve for me. Having approached the novel with the NaNoWriMo attitude of "No Plot No Problem," I then discovered that having no plot was, in fact, quite the problem once you get outside of NaNo and try to turn your 50,000 words into a full story. Still, c'est la vie. If it takes me another couple of months to get the story right (that's a conservative estimate, alas) then that's reasonably fine and dandy. At least when I start the next one I'll have a better idea of how to go about it.

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Graham Binns is a writer, photographer, musician and software developer from Lancaster, England, with far too much hair, a penchant for odd t-shirts and a magnificent hat. He has been making things up for as long as he can remember and has been making code work for long enough to make a living from it.

He has written one novel, which is in the process of composting, and is working remembering how to write before embarking on a second. In the meantime, he photographs things, since it's easier not to have to make the world up in his head all of the time.

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