Research and finishing up a four month project

Ok I discovered yesterday that I had made a mistake in my research when I was writing Funny Ties. I swear when I googled the Canadian post office that it said they were open for a half day on Saturday's like the US Post Office. This is not true they are closed the entire weekend much to my chagrin. This meant that I spent an hour yesterday combing through 5-6 chapters making adjustments to timelines and dates.

It wouldn't have been so bad had I discovered the error before I was almost done with my 2nd draft edit as I could have easily fixed the problem as I was editing. But I was almost done and was looking forward to Tuesday when I am going to print out two copies of the manuscript. One for my wife to have a go at with a red pen and the other just for sentimental reasons, hey it's my first completed novel and I am proud of it. Now if I had to go back and start and edit all over again to fix just that one problem it would be 3 weeks before I could print again. So with the lovely help of the search function and by skimming 6 chapters I think I fixed the problem and I can still print on Tuesday.

As much as I am proud of the work I am also looking forward to walking away from it for 3-4 weeks while the wife gives me some help on the editing front. Lately I have felt the self doubt monsters trying to consume my soul and if I didn't walk away from it I could be tweaking it for the next decade because of those self doubt monsters. I have had some encouraging words from a few people that I have let read it from a critical stand point (not an editing stand point) and when you hear someone call your novel engaging it is like a knight slaying a self doubt dragon that has been running wild in your mind

So tomorrow I am going back to writing, engulfing myself in a new story and saying goodbye to Funny Ties for the next month, whew. I love the book, and hearing words like engaging makes me very happy. But my new project is going to be so different than the project I just finished and I am thinking that when I come back to it in a month it will be with fresh eyes once more. Funny Ties is a character piece, there is only one major character and his story and everyone else in the novel is just a cameo character. This meant there was little dialogue and it was almost more of an internal novel filled with the actions of my character. My next novel is not like that at all. I can already see four maybe five major characters and lots of dialogue so it is going to be a complete shifting of gears.

Next week I am thinking of posting the first couple pages of Funny Ties on here but for now I am just happy to be done for the time being.

Can't Keep Up

Ever since I started to write in earnest three months ago all of a sudden I am having more and more ideas for books and novels. And I am afraid to lose these ideas before I get around to actually writing them so every couple of weeks of late I am having to stop and hammer out the first chapter of a new novel I want to write.

I had a great idea today and of course I had to sit at the computer and type out the first five pages. Maybe its just a way to procrastinate having to edit my first novel some more, because as said before editing sucks. Or maybe it was because these ideas have been sitting in my head for years and because up until now I hadn't been typing them out they saw the first chance to escape and they are trying to make a mass exodus from my brain to paper where others can read them.

Whatever the reason all of a sudden I feel buried by ideas and doubt I will ever be able to get them to paper fast enough. Oh and I should be editing Funny Ties some more, I am only 5 chapters in on a second draft edit right now.

Where's the Beef?

I originally conjured the idea of Funny Ties more than a year ago but didn't put it to paper until just three months ago. That's not entirely true though, I didn't come up with the story a year ago that eventually became my novel. All I came up with at that time was my hero the main character of my story.

I go for a walk every night and I remember it was a cold wintery day and dark, I am thinking it was sometime in January or February. I came up with the character of Darrell Smith the main character of my story and the moment I got home I poured out two whole pages of the story and subsquently left the project at that point for more than a year. You see I had no middle to my story. I had a clear beginning, a good ending and a great character but not middle. Where's the beef?

I think that is why in the ten years of me actually wanting to write a novel I never actually put pen to paper or fingers to keys. I had good ideas and great characters but I was unsure of that middle part, what happens when you are going from point A to point B. I could have hammered out novellas and short stories by the dozens because truth be told you don't really need that great of a middle in such works of fiction.

But more than a year after the character of Darrell Smith was born as I was taking a walk once more the middle came to me. It had been another idea for a story I had always wanted to write and it fit perfectly with Darrell Smith. No longer did my book lack the beef, it finally had its quarter pound of beef to fit inside its buns.

I wonder if other writers go through this, maybe this is what writer's block is for many writers. So I sit here at 1am typing thoughts as they spill out of my brain and lament the fact that the second novel I wanted to write, a story that has nagged me for a decade still has no beef. I am thinking the novel I dreamt up just two months ago has more beef and I still should be concentrating on editing my first novel before I worry about my second one but I can't help it editing sucks and I want to get back to writing.

Editing Sucks

Saturday night we watched the Shining again following in my recent fascination with Stephen King as a writer. At the same time I am reading his book On Writing and he mentions that he didn't realize that Jack Torrance an alcoholic ex-school teacher was actually based on himself until 1985 eight years after the book was published. But that's not what struck me when watching the movie. What struck me was the typewriter even though all Jack writes on it is "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy."

Right now I am finishing up my first draft edit of my own book something that has taken me twice as long as I would have imagined. The first day I did an edit and a read through of the book I got through three chapters and since the book is 24 chapters long the math in me said it would only take a week to get through the rest of the book. But two weeks later I am just hoping to finish my first draft edit today instead of last week sometime. Simply put editing sucks.

But the reason the typewriter struck me while watching the movie is that I could have never written a novel using a typewriter. In just my first draft edit of my own manuscript I have added almost 4000 words and fixed numerous errors. I am just not a clean first draft kind of person. I know some people can hammer out a very clean first draft but that's not me and I am thinking I will need three or four drafts before I am even ready to submit to agents. At that point if I do get picked up I can see another draft being done with an editor.

Now try and imagine doing all those drafts and all those changes on a typewriter the mere thought gives me the shivers. I can't even begin to fathom how they pulled it off. Did you type it out then go at it with a red pen like an over zealous English teacher and then have to retype the whole darn thing once more.

Maybe I am just from a different era an era that had computers where one could adjust ones thoughts as one went along and hence I never learned the dire need to have a clean first draft The thought of having to type and edit a manuscript, a 250 page behemoth, on a typewriter scares me more than the Shining did.

Novels and Dreams

I have been reading On Writing a Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King as of late and he talks about a band him and some fellow writers began in 1992. He said one of the best things about hanging out with other writers is they don't ask you where you get your ideas from because they know that other writers understand they don't know where ideas come from.

I had a dream two months ago and it gave me a great idea for a novel but it was one of those 3am dreams that you wake up from but don't remember much of it by 9am when you get up. I did write a one paragraph synopsis of it though the next morning. Well while taking a nap yesterday I had the same dream or a similar dream again and this time since it was a nap dream I was able to better foster the idea and get it to paper.

So while I should be editing Funny Ties my first novel that I finished last week I found myself today sitting down and starting to write a little of possibly my second novel. The funny thing was I was going to actually write a completely different novel for my second novel as soon as I was done editing Funny Ties.

Its a story that has been nagging at me for ten years now and two years ago I wrote the first ten pages to it and the first chapter. But this morning I hammered out 5 pages of this new idea that has only been with me for two months.

So now I face that quandry of which book to write next, Bonkers or Villain but I really need to get back to editing Funny Ties first.

Star Trek

Ok I have never been that big of a Trek fan and even though I have midnight tickets to see the movie tonight I am not overly enthused or excited by it. My biggest problem with the new Trek is that Kirk with always be William Shatner and Spock will always be Leonard Nimoy. The fact that they are replacing what was a young cast when the series first aired in the 1960's with a young cast in the reboot seems utterly moronic. Sometimes you have to just let series' die, everything has a natural evolution and Star Trek has of late become just a fanboy fascination.

That being said I hunted out and obtained all four Star Trek glasses released by Burger King yesterday.


For some reason the Burger King glasses made me giddy. I have been trying to obtain a complete set of the Star Wars ones released for all three Star Wars movies during the 70's and 80's.

Luckily the lady (a Mexican call me racist but for some reason most fast food restraunts now days are staffed by Mexicans who can barely speak English rather than teenagers that made up the staffing in my day and era) sold me all four glasses even though I only bought one value meal. Which means now I don't have to eat at Burger King three more times to get the whole set. Stupid people can be used to your advantage every now and then.