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Showing posts from February, 2015

Allan's Rule For Re-Reading Your First Draft... Read the WHOLE Thing

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Don't trash that crappy first draft! Oh it may be full of grammatical errors that would send your high school English teachers into hysterics but that's not reason enough to throw it away.  And maybe the plot line may move like a 1920's Model T going backwards up the crooked mile, still is it truly worth destroying?  And perhaps most of the characters may be as shallow as a puddle, and probably deserve to be drowned in one, but do not throw that draft away!  Instead I want you read every last word, e ven if it's hard as hell to get past the first few pages, keep reading!  Do not stop until you've read the entire thing .   Why? I hear you ask.   Because, that shitty first draft may be the most important one you ever write. I'm being serious here folks.  And no I'm not going to be going on about how every journey in writing starts with a first draft, or something like that.  What I am going to tell you is that first drafts, even the

Update On Me and "The Door"

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How are things coming along with your next novel, "The Door" ? I've been hearing that a fair amount lately and I can tell you that last weekend I added another 2000 words to it.  This brought the total word count to just shy of 19,000.  A pretty good number, don't you think?  I'm proud of it.   Unfortunately when Sunday arrived so did something else, my Fibromyalgia.   It flared up with a vengeance and at first I wasn't even really sure it was the Fibro acting up.  I thought I might be coming down with a bug a or something.  But as the day progressed and became Monday I knew better.  There were no other flu or cold symptoms, just fatigue, pain and severe clumsiness which erupted when I least expected it. So I was forced to take a few steps back and slow down on what I could do.  I knew from experience that I'd have to budget my time and energies so as not to wipe myself out each day.  I stuck to the most important tasks such as attending