The graph to the left shows a drop in my word output in November, suggesting I spent much less time writing. That is not the case. My word output dropped because I was proofreading/editing and redrafting. I continued redrafting a novel and spent a week trying to finalise a long short story due for submission for a Christmas anthology at the end of November.

I ended up writing about 5820 new words of fiction for the month.

Critiquing.

I received three critiques of my story for the Christmas anthology during the month. One was a very useful full edit, another was just a comment agreeing with the suggested edits of a previous critique, and the other… Well, first, some background.

I did a copy edit/critique of one of the other stories written for our Christmas anthology. It was a non-fiction story about a Christmas spent in an indigenous community. I really enjoyed the story. I found it informative and was interested in reading about life in an Indigenous community written by someone who had lived in one. I made a fair few edits to the story, many for what I thought were repeated grammar errors.

The writer was unhappy with my critique or the other one he had received. He said that as his writing was not good enough, he would withdraw his story from the anthology and quit our writing group. I wrote back to him that it was a shame he was withdrawing his story, as I thought it would be a worthy addition to the anthology.

He also said this about my story:

“I printed it out and commenced reading but was unable to finish it…….without saying anything I gave it to my wife to read. She couldn’t finish reading it either and her ‘critique, was summed up in two words, …….”It’s weird.””

As you can see from his comment, one of his various writing problems is the overuse of ellipses.

But I did not take his comments to heart as they appeared to be written out of spite. I also don’t think my story is that great, and I am still changing it.

At the end of November, I asked Chris, whose book I helped edit, to look at my story. He agreed to do so. But I then realised that I should hurry up and finish it (is a story ever finished?) because it was due for submission at the end of November. Chris did have a look at the first 2,000 words or so, though.

In contrast to the upset I caused the writer of the Christmas story, another writer was very happy with my critique of his 66,000-word novel. It took me just on three months to critique and it was the first volume of what could be a very entertaining and interesting science fiction trilogy. I offered to critique the sequel. I also critiqued another story for the anthology, and again, the writer appreciated my comments.

Reading

Again, I did very little reading for the month.

A New Article on Divine

An article I wrote on an audio description trial on the ABC’s iview service went up on Divine a few days ago. Please have a look, because when your eyesight is failing in years to come, you might need audio description when watching television.

I wrote more words of my novel in June than May, even though I started using Facebook again. I had a rule of not logging on to Facebook until I had written at least 500 words. So, on some days, I did not even log on to it. However, I developed the habit of stopping writing not long after I hit the 500-word mark so that I could play on Facebook. On 26 days during the month, I achieved my goal of 500 words; only on two days did I do more than 600 words. My best day was 1089 words. I wrote 15,488 words for the month—an average of 516 words a day.

I have written about 102,000 words of the novel and am about halfway through the fifth and final part. I had hoped to have finished the first draft by now, but I have decided to expand the final part. The decision to do that came about because previously I have read novels with characters on a physical journey arriving at their destination and then the novel suddenly ends, with a disappointed me wanting them to explore their destination more thoroughly. So, I have decided to satisfy a reader like me by doing the exploring.

I had pictured the novel as a stand-alone, but ideas for a sequel set 20 years later keep popping into my head, so there will be a sequel. But first, I have to re-draft this manuscript. Before that, I want to write a short story for a Christmas anthology that is being put together by one of my writing groups. A first draft is required by the end of August. Now, I just have to come up with an idea.

Critiquing.

Once again, I critiqued a story a week for critters.org during June. I read a story from a writer on the Australian Writers Forum, intending to critique it, when technology problems intervened: my internet was slowing down and dropping out. I am still unsure what caused the issue, even though I was reasonably systematic about trying to fix it. First, I replaced the splitter, which didn’t work, and then I replaced the long telephone cable with a shorter one, but the web dropped out just after I connected it. Then I bought a new top-of-the-range router/wifi thingy, as my router was about seven years old and the wifi about five. But the new router/wifi would not even connect to Westnet/iinet, my ISP.  I rang them and spent two hours on the phone; it still didn’t work. They said they would try a few things and asked me to keep my old router and wifi connected. They said they would ring back in two hours or so. Two and a half hours later, I got impatient and reconnected to the new router/wifi. It worked. Five days later, it has not dropped out and is slightly faster than before it slowed. iinet did ring back the next day, 26 hours later. They said they had fiddled with things, but I am none the wiser about whether my new router/wifi is more stable or something they did made my connection more stable.

Reading.

I did not do much reading during June as I was too tired at night. Fortunately, that tiredness has receded in the past week or so; I have no idea why. I am about two-thirds of the way through Amnesia, Peter Carey’s very enjoyable romp through 20th-century Australian politics and history. Its narrator is a very committed writer who is using an old portable typewriter to type even though he burnt his fingers trying to retrieve a manuscript thrown into a fire by its pissed-off subject.

Hopefully, some of his commitment will rub off on me, enabling me to finish the first draft of my current manuscript in July.

In May I started behaving more like a writer, even though I am still very tired. I wrote a lot more, and I started critiquing again. I put this down to quitting Facebook six weeks ago. I really missed Facebook, to begin with, but not so much anymore. I gave myself permission a few days ago to go back on Facebook, but I still haven’t ventured onto it, though I might to plug this blog post. I decided to only go on Facebook after I have written at least 500 words of fiction – or edited for 2-3 hours — and have done whatever critiquing activities I had scheduled for that day.

Novel Writing.

In May, I wrote 13,525 words of my novel Branded, more than doubling my monthly totals for this year. I reached my daily quota of 500 words on 18 days, with 1020 words as my best daily total. So, I averaged 436 words a day.

I have written approximately 87,000 words of the novel. I had hoped that the first draft would be around 90,000 words, but my characters decided not to cooperate with each other at the end of part four. Consequently, I have just started the fifth and final part of the novel. It should go for around another 10,000 words. So, I should finish the first draft in June.

I am writing it as a stand-alone novel with some hanging threads for the reader to imagine what might happens next. But those threads are starting to wrap my imagination in sequel ideas.

Critiquing.

In my last post, I mentioned that I had joined critters.org and the Australian Writers Forum. In May, I did a critique a week for critters, three short stories and the first chapter of a novel. One short story impressed with a non-traditional narrative style.  But the novel appeared to have a very overused plot driver.

So far, nothing has appeared on the Australian Writers Forum for me to critique, so I will start searching for active Australian science fiction critiquing groups again.

Reading.

I finished reading the disappointing What the Family Needed, by Steven Amsterdam. It had none of the urgency or call to action of his excellent Things We Didn’t See Coming. I will review What the Family Needed in my next blog post. I am just about to start reading Amnesia by Peter Carey. He’s one of my favourite authors, I loved True History of the Kelly Gang, and Illywhacker was great fun, too.

I had hoped that I would be on safe ground mentioning this website because its creator – who I interviewed – had what I considered a great deal of credibility due to her advocacy in the disability field. The website has also been written about in mainstream newspapers.

My initial reaction to the editor’s request for changes was that the article would not work without mentioning the website, so I should just scrap the idea. But then, what would I write? I had no idea. Coming up with ideas for Divine is becoming harder, and researching and writing them seems to be less enjoyable and fulfilling.

The last article I enjoyed writing for Divine was a review of the movie The Theory of Everything. The unsentimental and unsensational movie, combined with some knowledge of Hawking, made it easy to write. But since then, I have had various issues when researching and writing articles. I thought that with the problems my recent submissions were encountering, maybe I should just take a break. So, I shot off an email to my editor saying I was going to scrap the article and take a break.

When I finally looked at the article again, I found it relatively easy to remove the website name and make the necessary changes to still have a reasonable article. So, I sent another email to my editor saying that I could make the changes if she still wanted the article. I had real doubts about whether the editor actually wanted the article. I also had real doubts that it or anything else I had written for Divine was any good. I feared my enthusiasm for Divine had more to do with my articles being published than my writing.

I then began questioning whether anything I had ever written was more than misguided enthusiasm and whether my Master of Creative Writing was more of a Master of Creative Delusion. On top of that, I thought my writing had improved little over the years and might even have gone backwards due to my constant tiredness.

Anyway, I decided to take a real break from writing and get away for a few days. I went to Melbourne for four nights. I went to the footy, Scienceworks (including the planetarium), the zoo, and the museum. I almost expelled writing from my mind for four days, except when I came across two ideas for articles for Divine.

But then came the day I was due to return home, and I checked my emails. My editor wanted to speak to me. She wanted to “renegotiate” how I wrote for Divine. This sounded ominous to me, like she was going to take the opportunity to get rid of a crap writer. Unfortunately/fortunately, she was not in the office that day, so I could not contact her to have my fears confirmed. Instead, I had all day, including a three-and-a-half-hour train trip, to ponder what renegotiate meant. As it turned out, I did a lot more than ponder Divine; I spent a lot of the train trip thinking about my writing goals and why I was still standing alone at full-back, a long way from my goals.

I concluded that I was more in love with the idea of being a writer and trying to appear like one, rather than actually being one. I have written 46 articles of varying quality for Divine. I have written a post for this blog nearly every week for the past seven years, and I have done a number of writing courses. I have completed Nanowrimo three times, and I have connected to 100’s of writers through social media and some of the published ones actually commented on my posts. I even write every day, but precious little quality fiction.

I am still yet to have any fiction published. I have three novel scripts, a novella, and numerous short stories all filed away in first or second draft stage. Although I write every day, I don’t write much, and on many days, writing is the last thing I get around to doing. I don’t read much, either. The way I am going, when I die, the sum total of my fiction writing will be a dozen first/second draft novel manuscripts on a USB stick, which no one else will ever read.

Something had to change. On the train trip home, I felt I had two choices: either get stuck into fiction writing or quit. By getting stuck in, I mean writing a lot more quality fiction and improving as I learned more about the writing process. To help improve my writing, I need to get it critiqued.

I need to make changes in my life to help me achieve my writing goals. The big one is to overcome my constant tiredness. I am sure one of my chronic illnesses has a lot to do with it, so it’s time to finally try everything to get it under control. To help with this, I decided to reduce some of the stress in my life, part of which I achieved by negotiating a two-month break from Divine. I have no doubt that my reaction to the Divine editor’s changes and my diminished enthusiasm for writing for Divine has been influenced by my tiredness.

I decided to get off social media. There are a number of reasons for doing this, including using that time to write. But primarily, I want to get rid of the delusional satisfaction that I am a real writer because I associate with actual writers, many of whom are published authors. In reality, I am just a wannabee writer. So, I quit Facebook a fortnight ago. The lack of contact with people I care about, and many who I am curious about, has been very hard, and I really miss playing Word with Anny during my afternoon coffee break.

I decided to get some quid pro quo going for critiquing. I re-joined critters.org, and I also joined the Australian Writers’ Forum. I need to find other science fiction writers for mutual critiquing. My search for trusted critiquers and beta readers begins.

I also have decided to spend less time blogging. Some of the posts on this blog have taken many hours to research and write, time I could have spent writing or learning about writing. From now on, most of my posts will be book reviews. I figure reviewing books will get me thinking about what works in writing.

So, what did I actually achieve writing wise during the month? As I didn’t write for 14 days in a row, I only added 3766 words to the novel. I read a book, Robert Swindells’ nuclear apocalypse young adult novel Brother in the Land, review pending.

PS. I seem to be writing more fiction since I quit Facebook. And I also find myself thinking more about the novel I am writing and not about some status update on Facebook. But computer problems have not helped. First, there was some malware, then a product recall on the power cord for my laptop, where they recommended only using it once a new cord arrived. Toshiba told me they would “process” my registration for a new cord within five working days. Does that include mailing the thing out? I was also having trouble with the laptop’s DVD burner, so I bought a new computer. Now, I have to get used to using Windows 8. In between fiddling with the new computer, transferring files, and trying to remember all those passwords, I did make the time to critique a story for critters. Yay, one whole critique this year.

Novel Writing.

In March, I added 5848 words to Branded, a science-fiction, young adult novel, so I improved on February’s 4841 words. I averaged 188 words per day in March compared to 173 words per day for February and 155 words per day in January.

The novel is now just under 70,000 words. It has five parts, and I am probably just over halfway into the fourth part. It looks like the novel will be about 100,000 words, at least the first draft.

I am still very much enjoying writing it. The dysfunctional group of characters are barely getting on at the moment, but one of the causes is about to be removed.

Non-Fiction Writing.

I wrote one article for Divine in March. It was about a lack of actors with disabilities playing characters with disabilities, especially in Australian movies and television. I contacted a few people in the industry for the article, and about half of them got back to me. I learned much about the issue from those who did, like Australian actress Kate Hood. She had the unique perspective of being an in-demand actress before she developed a disability, and she is involved in an Actor’s Equity disability committee.

A lot has been written about actors without disabilities “cripping up” to play characters with disabilities. My article attempts to provide some factual information from people and organisations directly involved in the industry, such as actors, casting agencies, and unions (note that the producers and directors did not get back to me).

The article, Actors with Disabilities, was published on Divine last Thursday.

I also started researching my next article on disability parking. It concerns people without disabilities who feel they are entitled to park in disability parking spots.

Blog Writing.

I have four posts for the month. I missed a week while researching a post on ebook piracy, which I found to be very common. Every author I checked had pirated versions of their ebooks available on the web.

Reading.

I read two books for the month and enjoyed them both. No Limit, by Australian/New Zealander Holly Childs. It is a hip novella full of hip people doing hip things while they worry about the world ending.  And The Method, by Juli Zeh, which is a dystopian science-fiction thriller in the tradition of 1984 and Brave New World.

Critiquing.

I still have not critiqued anything this year.

So far this year, I have written on every day.

Health permitting, I hope to greatly improve on my novel writing efforts and critique something, anything, in April.

In an attempt to motivate myself, I decided at the start of this year to write a monthly blog post about my writing efforts for the previous month. 

Novel Writing.

I am still writing Branded, a science fiction young adult novel. In February, I added 4841 words, 25 words more than in January, and in three fewer days. So, I averaged 173 words a day for the month, compared to 155 words a day in January.

The novel is now just under 65,000 words. It has five parts, and I am probably a quarter of the way into the fourth. It still looks like the novel will be somewhere between 90,000 and 100,000 words.

I am still very much enjoying writing it. The dysfunctional group of characters are barely getting on at the moment, but not for much longer. 

Non-Fiction Writing.

I wrote two articles for Divine in February, both of which went up on the website during the month. Both were reviews of films whose central character has a disability. One was a review of Still Alice, a film where the main character has early on-set Alzheimer’s, and the other was a biography of scientist Stephen Hawking, The Theory of Everything.

My reviews concentrated on the films’ disability aspects, highlighting whether the characters with disabilities were realistically portrayed and what experience the movie’s writers had with disabilities.

My next article fits in with those reviews as I research why actors with that disability rarely portray characters with disabilities. 

Blog Writing.

I just squeezed in the four blog posts last month, posting the last on the 28^th of February. 

Reading.

I actually finished reading a novel – yay for me – the very good  Zoo City by Lauren Beukes. I reviewed it in my last blog post. It only took me four whole months to read – my excuse is tiredness as for about nine weeks of those four months I was sick or taking a medication that made me tired.

I am currently reading No Limits by Holly Childs, a hip novella full of hip people doing hip things. Like Beukes, I saw Childs at last year’s Melbourne Writers Festival. Hopefully, it won’t take me four months to read her book.

Critiquing.

Like in January, I did not make time to critique anyone else’s writing in February. Not good.

Also, like in January, I wrote every day of the month.

Health permitting, I hope to greatly improve my writing and reading efforts in March so that these monthly posts don’t continue to resemble a guilt sheet.

In an attempt to motivate myself, I have decided to write a monthly blog post about my writing efforts for the previous month.

Novel Writing.

I am currently writing a young adult novel, Branded. I wrote the first chapter as part of a writing for young adults subject in a Master of Creative Writing I finished in 2007. I then filed the chapter away as I concentrated on other writing. I pulled it back out for last November’s National Novel Writing Month, adding just over 50,000 words in that month. In January, I added a further 4816 words, an average of 155 words a day.

The novel is now just under 60,000 words. It has five parts, and I have just started part four.  It looks like it will be somewhere between 90,000 and 100,000 words.

I am still very much enjoying writing it, especially after I just managed to get most of the dysfunctional group of characters back to working together.

Non-Fiction Writing.

I had two articles up on Divine last month, twice as many as usual. One was on robots helping people with disabilities and the other gave some reasons for the low participation rate of the people with disabilities in the workforce.

I successfully pitched four ideas to the editor. Two of the articles will be film reviews. I am currently writing one of them. They will be slightly different from the typical film review because of their disability angle.

Blog Writing.

I wrote four blog posts last month; the last one took a lot of time to research and write as I analysed the novels on the Goodreads Choice Awards science fiction list.

Reading.

I am halfway through Lauren Beukes’s very enjoyable science fiction novel Zoo . It is a mystery novel set in a marvellously inventive near-future South Africa.

Critiquing.

I did not make time to critique anyone else’s writing in January. Not good.

But I did write every day of the month.

Health permitting, I hope to improve significantly on my writing and reading efforts in February so these monthly posts don’t start resembling a guilt sheet.