Well today was an ups and downs day with this whole revising business.
I woke up relatively late (9.30am) and proceeded to revise another Invincible volume (7). I also read part of another graphic novel: Criminal Macabre by Steve Niles (a great, promising intro but that didn't deliver all that much for me in the end) and Ben Templesmith (really dig his art but sometimes I just can't understand what the heck's happening...)
Then I started revising.
And it was going well.
Until people started wanting my attention.
Which was fine.
For the first three hours.
Then I started getting somewhat upset at it because I couldn't focus for more than 5 minutes at a time...
So I did what I thought was best. I listened until I found that there was nothing else that I needed to listen, until there was nothing else left to be said.
And I excused myself.
Amidst all this I finished that Niles/Templesmith comic, the Invincible review, started another, read a bit of Scalped: The Gravel In Your Guts (now that's a GREAT comic - toes and thumbs up).
I began to revise...
And it felt good.
I really need these moments where I can focus at will and my mind just wanders.
You see, one of the reasons I started getting angry was because today really felt one of those GOOD REVISION days. And there aren't that many of them. I'd kept my momentum going as soon as my attention started being sapped and, after a while I couldn't stop but think at the great opportunity I was missing.
I still revised a couple of short chapters today. And I did finish yesterday's.
I'm on day six. Afternoon.
And tomorrow is a new revision day... well... until 2pm it is...
peace!
Friday, 18 June 2010
Tuesday, 15 June 2010
Revision Update
Well, yesterday I didn't manage to do a single line of revision. I had a REALLY long day and, as soon as I got home and had some food, I was ready to fall into the dreaming.
And I say fall because I couldn't jump, even if I wanted to...
And dream I did, even if they weren't particularly pleasant. Sometimes you seem to wake up in some ways more tired than when you went to bed and then you kind of work it out of your system during the day.
These days I don't try to remember my dreams so much since I more or less know what they represent.
Today they meant I'm stressed and I need to rest.
And that's what I'm going to do tomorrow.
(and write, of course...)
Yesterday the only writing bit that I did manage to do was to finish reviewing a comic book and revise that review. And then publish it on the livejournal website for the Graphic Novels Reading Group that I run.
If you want to take a look, you can just click HERE.
Today was more or less the same scenario with the difference I did manage to get a little bit more done. I revised Scalped Vol.3 Dead Mothers (amazing book - one of the best crime stories around) from beginning to end, revised the first 4 short stories in Flight Vol.5, published the review for Brit Vol.3 Fubar and am about to begin revising Invincible Vol.7 Three's Company.
I still haven't published any of the Invincible reviews I've done but I will do so as soon as I can be bothered to type them all up.
Hopefully I'll be able to blitzpost them during a couple of weeks or so.
In the meantime I'll revise vols 7, 8 and 9... and get my hands on vols 10, 11 and 12!!
I have found that doing a bit of revising someone else's stuff before starting to revise my own really does help me gain some perspective and, perhaps most importantly, some momentum.
I am in hopes of going home in an hour or so and still write a bit... let's see how that turns out...
peace.
And I say fall because I couldn't jump, even if I wanted to...
And dream I did, even if they weren't particularly pleasant. Sometimes you seem to wake up in some ways more tired than when you went to bed and then you kind of work it out of your system during the day.
These days I don't try to remember my dreams so much since I more or less know what they represent.
Today they meant I'm stressed and I need to rest.
And that's what I'm going to do tomorrow.
(and write, of course...)
Yesterday the only writing bit that I did manage to do was to finish reviewing a comic book and revise that review. And then publish it on the livejournal website for the Graphic Novels Reading Group that I run.
If you want to take a look, you can just click HERE.
Today was more or less the same scenario with the difference I did manage to get a little bit more done. I revised Scalped Vol.3 Dead Mothers (amazing book - one of the best crime stories around) from beginning to end, revised the first 4 short stories in Flight Vol.5, published the review for Brit Vol.3 Fubar and am about to begin revising Invincible Vol.7 Three's Company.
I still haven't published any of the Invincible reviews I've done but I will do so as soon as I can be bothered to type them all up.
Hopefully I'll be able to blitzpost them during a couple of weeks or so.
In the meantime I'll revise vols 7, 8 and 9... and get my hands on vols 10, 11 and 12!!
I have found that doing a bit of revising someone else's stuff before starting to revise my own really does help me gain some perspective and, perhaps most importantly, some momentum.
I am in hopes of going home in an hour or so and still write a bit... let's see how that turns out...
peace.
Monday, 14 June 2010
Land Of Fog Revision
Hey there!
Well, I'm back from holiday (and I didn't do much while I was away... that I must admit...) and I'm back on good old revising...
I'm on page 30 (A4, single spaced...) of my manuscript and I already have 57 pages of notes... (longhand)
I've been thinking about the structure a bit and I do think I'm going to go for a less obvious one than the chronological. I think this will enable me to start with greater momentum and create more drama.
The book takes place throughout 13 days and I'm on the evening of day five. I'm expecting things to go a bit easier from now on, not only because I've gained some momentum but also because I've managed to sort out some of the slower/plot-holes in the story.
There are still two extra chapters that i have to write but I'll do those after I've revised the whole body of text. These two chapters need to introduce clues and hints to things that will happen in this book and on the following two so... I want to be as ready as possible for that to happen.
The revision has been going slowly but steadily. I think that it's probably quite difficult to have a "fast" first revision. This is where all the big things surface and it has always meant major re-writing for me so... I guess this is as good as it gets!
At least for now!
peace.
Well, I'm back from holiday (and I didn't do much while I was away... that I must admit...) and I'm back on good old revising...
I'm on page 30 (A4, single spaced...) of my manuscript and I already have 57 pages of notes... (longhand)
I've been thinking about the structure a bit and I do think I'm going to go for a less obvious one than the chronological. I think this will enable me to start with greater momentum and create more drama.
The book takes place throughout 13 days and I'm on the evening of day five. I'm expecting things to go a bit easier from now on, not only because I've gained some momentum but also because I've managed to sort out some of the slower/plot-holes in the story.
There are still two extra chapters that i have to write but I'll do those after I've revised the whole body of text. These two chapters need to introduce clues and hints to things that will happen in this book and on the following two so... I want to be as ready as possible for that to happen.
The revision has been going slowly but steadily. I think that it's probably quite difficult to have a "fast" first revision. This is where all the big things surface and it has always meant major re-writing for me so... I guess this is as good as it gets!
At least for now!
peace.
Wednesday, 2 June 2010
Book Competition
It's been a long time since I last wrote here...
Can't really tell why. I just seem to go through these periods where every little thing that happens needs to be blogged and periods where I just can't be asked. I mean, I think about it but...
Well, you probably know how it is.
As soon as I returned from Portugal I jumped straight into work with a Cory Doctorow talk that I organised. It left me wanting to write and try and publish more.
Soon after that I realised that there was a big competition closing by the end of the month that I could actually enter with my 130 000+ manuscript.
And thus my troubles began...
I've been meaning to post about this for a while and maybe I will post the solutions separately. Here I'll just blog the problems...
Say you have a book with almost 120 chapters. Say you want to format it to A5. Say you want to print it out in a way that saves paper, ink and some time (preferably...).
Say you've never done it before.
Then I'll say this: give yourself some time.
I spent ages just trying to sort out the numbering on the pages. Then it was the formatting of the text itself.
Let me make this very clear, if you're fiddling with margins - even if it's to do something equivalent to what you already have - you'll have to checke the whole thing again... and, if you're like me, that STILL doesn't know how to create a proper chapter list (either than manually that is... now I need to start learning some word... well... some more word...) you'll not only have to format the whole text again, but also check chapter pages...
Two days into it and I more or less lost track of what I was doing.
Well, kind off.
I picked up a few things as I went along.
As soon as I go the whole thing worked out I did another version of the text in Royal format (somewhere between A4 and A5). The objective with this was to then send the book to lulu.com, self-publish and then send the two needed copies to enter the competition.
But I was running out of time and, for about a week I didn't really want to go through the whole thing again, a couple of times more, create a cover, add the cover, make sure that the cover was larger than what I needed... and etc...
During that time I just revised Land Of Fog and wrote some reviews, read some comics and generally tried to chill.
Obviously I started to run out of time.
No problem, right? I can still print it out myself. It won't go a perfectly bound copy but it will be good enough.
So I did.
And thus my troubles began.
Or, rather, continued...
I had printed the whole manuscript once in A5 sheets that I myself had cut.
It wasn't a pleasant experience. I had to print out a very low number of pages at a time, pages kept getting jammed and I kept having to go back and repeat printings and ended up monitoring the whole thing through.
Which was what I was trying to avoid in the first place...
Well, how hard could it be to grab my A5 formatted book, print it in A4 - 2 A5 pages per each A4 side - and then chop it and bind it?
Surely it's not hard.
Well. It wasn't initially.
My first surprise was this.
Just because you've formatted your book in A5, doesn't mean you can just say,
Hey, it's two of these per one of that
and the formatting will still be hunky dory...
That did not happen with me, let me tell you...
(don't know why - it's one of those things that common sense tells you is completely crazy to happen but, there you go...)
So what did happen was me having to format the whole thing again.
Now that I could see that everything should print out nicely surely it was easy to just print it out, right?
I guess that by now you'll know the answer to this...
Just try and google, how to print A5 booklet on A4 paper or any equivalent.
You'll get lots and lots of pages with people complaining at how hard it is to do it.
I don't think it's actually that hard - but it can be quite frustrating if you don't get a decent page with some good tips.
My life saviour was actually a Microsoft Office/Word help page.
Believe it or not this is the truth. Clear, concise and to the point. It wasn't ideal in terms of the information I needed but it sure was the best one.
(Thanks for that guys and gals!)
I'll post this info later on at some point. There were a couple of things that I picked up along the way that I think might be useful for other people but I also want to keep a record of it so that I can refer to it at a later stage. Probably when the time comes for me to print out the next one...
(I'll probably have forgotten most of this by then...)
So I managed to print out two copies of the book.
Boy, was I happy!
I chopped the pages, no problem, bound them in my own special way, no problem, even found a little webpage that tells you how to build your own little binding press (easy and simple, you just need some hard wood and some screws), something that I may even do at some point.
It was done.
Great stuff.
Now, you ask,
Alright, what went wrong then?!
Well, nothing much.
I just happened to go to the publishers website to pick up all the details that I needed in relation to the competition and realised that they needed the manuscript in A4 format...
Then I looked at my ink levels.
Below half.
And I'd spent more or less half to print the two copies.
This was last wednesday. And I had to send it at best on saturday since monday was bank holiday...
Well... start from the beginning, right?!
Format the whole thing in A4 format. Compact the text in order to save paper and reduce shipping weight (being stressed has this wonderful perk of just allowing you to plough through things without worrying too much that things aren't perfect... I made full usage of this). And start printing the whole thing again.
I did it.
Two copies with a couple of warning low, very low, ink levels. And I still managed to print the cover letter and everything...
I burned the CD with all these multiple versions, instructions, cover letter, personal data, etc. I packed the whole thing as best as I could, to their specifications and sent all of it in one big beautiful bundle.
I felt relieved.
Later that day (or the day after, I can't really remember) I started to read the book to a friend. I read some forty pages (of one of my A5 copies... which I now am going to give out to friends).
Two things came across clearly.
I still need to do some minor revision on the first 20 pages (dammit!)
The writing is actually quite pleasant to read and engaging.
I think I would like to read this book...
Well, I had made my peace with all possible results and outcomes. I'm just happy that I got to send it. I'm just happy that the book is out there. I'm sure that it's going to be published. Of this I am certain. Don't ask me why (in truth I have no certain proof of this) but I just know it. In my gut. Despite all the little things that could do with some revising.
Perhaps because, despite all the little things, that story still stands. I think it's bigger than what contains it. And if I've managed to do that, then I've achieved my goal.
I more or less took a couple of days off. I still kept revising Land Of Fog but I wasn't that inspired. I was tired. I wanted to watch some films. Not having to think about anything in particular.
I more or less did that.
But I still revised a bit...
That's what I've been doing since.
It was a slow weekend. I had planned to do lots. But I only managed to revise 2 or 3 A4 pages of this other book a day.
That's the downside.
The upside is that I've been gaining momentum on that, that the beginning is much better than it was, that I discovered (and solved!) more problems than both of my friends (that had read that initial draft) had pointed out to me, that I now know how to give the book a better structure, that it's beginning to feel more rounded, that I know where it's going, that I already have the plot for most of the third and final book in the series, that it's getting bigger and better and more truthful to the spirit I had initially envisioned.
Or, in short,
I'm excited about it and working on things pays off...
The book is getting longer and I am still to add some two, perhaps three new chapters (that I'm hoping will be short).
I think it will be quite readable and eerie and gripping by then. It has a kind of Twilight Zone feel to it that I really want to keep and explore and make as cohesive as possible.
I'm throwing a lot of little things that will be explored more and more in subsequent stories.
Just yesterday, for example, I was re-writing a part where the main character chats with this elderly lady that ends up explaining (partially...) what the heck is happening. But before she does that, she tells him a part of her story or, to be more precise, the story of the place where they're sitting.
It's a nice piece, but I just leave it at that.
However... I just happen to know that we will be learning more about it in book three...
I'm going to portugal this coming thursday.
I'm taking all these notes and print outs with me and hopefully will work some more on my manuscript.
I read the submission guidelines to a publishing house a few days ago and I'm eager to send this one out!
I won't worry about Morto for the time being since the results from the competition will be announced towards the end of this year. I'll give out those two copies to two friends (and I already know who...) and wait for some more feedback. Probably read out aloud the whole thing again, polish those few lines where word repetition occurs (you can do it in english - but you really can't do it in portuguese...), get a decent cover for it at some point, send the whole thing to lulu.com and print out some twenty copies to distribute.
Anyway, enough chatting for now!
peace
Can't really tell why. I just seem to go through these periods where every little thing that happens needs to be blogged and periods where I just can't be asked. I mean, I think about it but...
Well, you probably know how it is.
As soon as I returned from Portugal I jumped straight into work with a Cory Doctorow talk that I organised. It left me wanting to write and try and publish more.
Soon after that I realised that there was a big competition closing by the end of the month that I could actually enter with my 130 000+ manuscript.
And thus my troubles began...
I've been meaning to post about this for a while and maybe I will post the solutions separately. Here I'll just blog the problems...
Say you have a book with almost 120 chapters. Say you want to format it to A5. Say you want to print it out in a way that saves paper, ink and some time (preferably...).
Say you've never done it before.
Then I'll say this: give yourself some time.
I spent ages just trying to sort out the numbering on the pages. Then it was the formatting of the text itself.
Let me make this very clear, if you're fiddling with margins - even if it's to do something equivalent to what you already have - you'll have to checke the whole thing again... and, if you're like me, that STILL doesn't know how to create a proper chapter list (either than manually that is... now I need to start learning some word... well... some more word...) you'll not only have to format the whole text again, but also check chapter pages...
Two days into it and I more or less lost track of what I was doing.
Well, kind off.
I picked up a few things as I went along.
As soon as I go the whole thing worked out I did another version of the text in Royal format (somewhere between A4 and A5). The objective with this was to then send the book to lulu.com, self-publish and then send the two needed copies to enter the competition.
But I was running out of time and, for about a week I didn't really want to go through the whole thing again, a couple of times more, create a cover, add the cover, make sure that the cover was larger than what I needed... and etc...
During that time I just revised Land Of Fog and wrote some reviews, read some comics and generally tried to chill.
Obviously I started to run out of time.
No problem, right? I can still print it out myself. It won't go a perfectly bound copy but it will be good enough.
So I did.
And thus my troubles began.
Or, rather, continued...
I had printed the whole manuscript once in A5 sheets that I myself had cut.
It wasn't a pleasant experience. I had to print out a very low number of pages at a time, pages kept getting jammed and I kept having to go back and repeat printings and ended up monitoring the whole thing through.
Which was what I was trying to avoid in the first place...
Well, how hard could it be to grab my A5 formatted book, print it in A4 - 2 A5 pages per each A4 side - and then chop it and bind it?
Surely it's not hard.
Well. It wasn't initially.
My first surprise was this.
Just because you've formatted your book in A5, doesn't mean you can just say,
Hey, it's two of these per one of that
and the formatting will still be hunky dory...
That did not happen with me, let me tell you...
(don't know why - it's one of those things that common sense tells you is completely crazy to happen but, there you go...)
So what did happen was me having to format the whole thing again.
Now that I could see that everything should print out nicely surely it was easy to just print it out, right?
I guess that by now you'll know the answer to this...
Just try and google, how to print A5 booklet on A4 paper or any equivalent.
You'll get lots and lots of pages with people complaining at how hard it is to do it.
I don't think it's actually that hard - but it can be quite frustrating if you don't get a decent page with some good tips.
My life saviour was actually a Microsoft Office/Word help page.
Believe it or not this is the truth. Clear, concise and to the point. It wasn't ideal in terms of the information I needed but it sure was the best one.
(Thanks for that guys and gals!)
I'll post this info later on at some point. There were a couple of things that I picked up along the way that I think might be useful for other people but I also want to keep a record of it so that I can refer to it at a later stage. Probably when the time comes for me to print out the next one...
(I'll probably have forgotten most of this by then...)
So I managed to print out two copies of the book.
Boy, was I happy!
I chopped the pages, no problem, bound them in my own special way, no problem, even found a little webpage that tells you how to build your own little binding press (easy and simple, you just need some hard wood and some screws), something that I may even do at some point.
It was done.
Great stuff.
Now, you ask,
Alright, what went wrong then?!
Well, nothing much.
I just happened to go to the publishers website to pick up all the details that I needed in relation to the competition and realised that they needed the manuscript in A4 format...
Then I looked at my ink levels.
Below half.
And I'd spent more or less half to print the two copies.
This was last wednesday. And I had to send it at best on saturday since monday was bank holiday...
Well... start from the beginning, right?!
Format the whole thing in A4 format. Compact the text in order to save paper and reduce shipping weight (being stressed has this wonderful perk of just allowing you to plough through things without worrying too much that things aren't perfect... I made full usage of this). And start printing the whole thing again.
I did it.
Two copies with a couple of warning low, very low, ink levels. And I still managed to print the cover letter and everything...
I burned the CD with all these multiple versions, instructions, cover letter, personal data, etc. I packed the whole thing as best as I could, to their specifications and sent all of it in one big beautiful bundle.
I felt relieved.
Later that day (or the day after, I can't really remember) I started to read the book to a friend. I read some forty pages (of one of my A5 copies... which I now am going to give out to friends).
Two things came across clearly.
I still need to do some minor revision on the first 20 pages (dammit!)
The writing is actually quite pleasant to read and engaging.
I think I would like to read this book...
Well, I had made my peace with all possible results and outcomes. I'm just happy that I got to send it. I'm just happy that the book is out there. I'm sure that it's going to be published. Of this I am certain. Don't ask me why (in truth I have no certain proof of this) but I just know it. In my gut. Despite all the little things that could do with some revising.
Perhaps because, despite all the little things, that story still stands. I think it's bigger than what contains it. And if I've managed to do that, then I've achieved my goal.
I more or less took a couple of days off. I still kept revising Land Of Fog but I wasn't that inspired. I was tired. I wanted to watch some films. Not having to think about anything in particular.
I more or less did that.
But I still revised a bit...
That's what I've been doing since.
It was a slow weekend. I had planned to do lots. But I only managed to revise 2 or 3 A4 pages of this other book a day.
That's the downside.
The upside is that I've been gaining momentum on that, that the beginning is much better than it was, that I discovered (and solved!) more problems than both of my friends (that had read that initial draft) had pointed out to me, that I now know how to give the book a better structure, that it's beginning to feel more rounded, that I know where it's going, that I already have the plot for most of the third and final book in the series, that it's getting bigger and better and more truthful to the spirit I had initially envisioned.
Or, in short,
I'm excited about it and working on things pays off...
The book is getting longer and I am still to add some two, perhaps three new chapters (that I'm hoping will be short).
I think it will be quite readable and eerie and gripping by then. It has a kind of Twilight Zone feel to it that I really want to keep and explore and make as cohesive as possible.
I'm throwing a lot of little things that will be explored more and more in subsequent stories.
Just yesterday, for example, I was re-writing a part where the main character chats with this elderly lady that ends up explaining (partially...) what the heck is happening. But before she does that, she tells him a part of her story or, to be more precise, the story of the place where they're sitting.
It's a nice piece, but I just leave it at that.
However... I just happen to know that we will be learning more about it in book three...
I'm going to portugal this coming thursday.
I'm taking all these notes and print outs with me and hopefully will work some more on my manuscript.
I read the submission guidelines to a publishing house a few days ago and I'm eager to send this one out!
I won't worry about Morto for the time being since the results from the competition will be announced towards the end of this year. I'll give out those two copies to two friends (and I already know who...) and wait for some more feedback. Probably read out aloud the whole thing again, polish those few lines where word repetition occurs (you can do it in english - but you really can't do it in portuguese...), get a decent cover for it at some point, send the whole thing to lulu.com and print out some twenty copies to distribute.
Anyway, enough chatting for now!
peace
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