Musings of Two Creative Minds

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...

As of today I'm already a third of the way through the 2nd draft of "The Ship".  Progress has been good and I've been pleased with how things are going.  There will probably be a 3rd draft as well.  What happens after that?  Well, that's a tale for another entry. Today I wish to discuss how I deal with a 2nd drafts.  I handle 3rd and 4th drafts the same way, so don't expect any blog entries on those.  It's the same process all over again to try catch whatever I missed on the previous draft.   Like many authors, I've been learning a lot of things on my own.  There's no exact set of rules for how to do  write and create a book, though many people have tried to explain it.  Every author is going to handle things differently, whether its how they create a story (with an outline, flying by the seat of your pants, etc.) to editing, proofreading, whatever.  Different things work for different people. In my case how I handle de...

     Well, one third of October is gone already and Halloween is coming.  But so is something more terrifying, at least for those who brave the challenge.  November is Nanowrimo Month and I've signed up for it.  For anyone unfamiliar with Nanowrimo, it's quite simple.  Starting on November 1st you have until the November 30th to write 50,000 words of a brand new novel.  That's right.  You start a brand new novel from scratch at the beginning of the month and try to write at least 50,000 words in 30 days.  It doesn't mean the novel has to be completed, you just have to have written that amount of words for your novel.      Now to some this sounds easy, to others it sounds daunting.  The object here is not to create finished product, but a first draft and have those 50,000 words of it done by the end of the month.  It has been calculated that a person would need to do 1666 words per day, without missing a single ...

For those of you who haven't heard yet, my father-in-law has been fighting cancer for the last year.  Unfortunately, he's fought the good fight but due to masses of blood clots in his head, they cannot finish the job.  So he is now in hospice care at home.  As you can imagine my wife, myself, and our family are devastated and are trying to spend as much time with him as we can.    So I won't be posting as much, but I don't want my readers to be left without much new here. So I'm offering you all the chance to post articles about writing here on my blog.  Feel free to push a book or books of yours, but please offer some tidbits or story about an aspect of writing and how it affected that particular book(s).   I'm looking for insights into plot, editing, characters, development, rewrites, cover art, publishing, agents, self-publishing, etc.  Again, all I ask is that if your pushing  book, make sure the article connects to it.   I ...