Happy Monday all! Whew, what a weekend. I made lots of progress with SHADE as you may have heard with Saturday’s post. I’m ready for Pitch Wars. Bring it!
I’m feeling the creative power!
I’m still going to be doing a little polishing all of today and probably most of the week. I ended up with 87,000 words as predicted. I’m still word economizing, so you never know, I may drop it to 86,000. Although when editing I sometimes stumble onto holes and holes sometimes require extra words. Something I learned about loving the editing process is discovering the never-ending battle of revision—at least it seems never-ending. I was lazy in the beginning. I just wanted my story to be good enough. Editing…ugh…why? But now I understand. Now I have seen how much better of a story I’ve gotten with the many drafts SHADE has been through. Now I’m no longer lazy and/or afraid of editing. I embrace it.
My advice? Get your novel critiqued. A lot. Go to conferences, find critique partners, try it out on friends and family, enter contests—do it all. You’re not as good of a writer as you think you are, unless you know that already. Because if you do, you’re already doing all the things I suggested, and you’re well on your way to becoming a good writer. And if you keep going, you may even be a great writer. That’s what I strive for.
All right, enough Jae motivational speeching for the day. Today’s quote is from William Faulkner:
Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything really good.
This goes out to all the writers who are still plotting and not writing. Plotting and planning is good, but sometimes you’ve just got to fly by the seat of your pants a little and see where it takes you. It’s must easier to edit something rather than nothing. Take that chance. See what you’ve got. It may even help you with further plotting. But never get so caught up in the planning you forget to implement the plan.
Oh, and two more days until Pitch Wars! Woot!
Lit and Scribbles with Jae 
Thinking back on it, it might be Sailor Moon that is responsible for my odd hair color fixation. 😉
Tee Hee! Love it! Because of Sailor Neptune or Sailor Mercury?
Neptune. It was her hair I was most jealous of. 🙂
I see someone is excited for Pitch Wars. 😉 Best of luck.
Of course! 🙂 Best of luck to you too!
Yes, embrace the editing! 🙂 For our original “final” draft (the one we had back in May for the conference), we were around 110k words. For our current “final” draft, we’re down under 90k. Pretty amazing how you can think something is done and polished, and yet still manage to cut 20,000 words out of it…I’m still not sure how that happened, but it definitely flows much better now. I blame Kati for the extra word padding… 😉
Good luck this week! So exciting!!
Wow! Nice work. And under 90k is great! I’ve heard under 100k is the magic number for agents. Best of luck Wednesday. I have high hopes we’ll all have good news to share!