Draft one done.
An email from my publisher pointing me to a new review, arrived in my inbox not ten minutes after I hit command+s on the first finished draft of book 2.
The Sceptre and the Sword is an unholy mess at the moment, but I look forward to the next few weeks of spring cleaning to get the 100,008 thousand words in order before I ship them off to Dragonfall press.
Meanwhile I will bask in the warmth of a lovely 25 degree day in Melbourne as well as this lovely quote from the aforementioned review:
Thank you - Dianne Dean -- whoever you are.
The Sceptre and the Sword is an unholy mess at the moment, but I look forward to the next few weeks of spring cleaning to get the 100,008 thousand words in order before I ship them off to Dragonfall press.
Meanwhile I will bask in the warmth of a lovely 25 degree day in Melbourne as well as this lovely quote from the aforementioned review:
You will be drawn deeply into Arkadia as you try to determine where the twists will lead you. And there are some nice subplots that develop some interesting characters to add depth to an already masterfully woven novel.
Thank you - Dianne Dean -- whoever you are.
P.S -- Actually, after a little internet stalking (get used to the idea that we writers are a deeply needy lot and any review -- good or bad -- will lead us down the rabbit hole until we find out who said what and why) it turns out Dianne Dean is a writer herself who runs the Australian writer's resource page -- lots of cool links there. She has a book out too, 'The Slave Witch' which sounds cool.
Congrats Trav - looking forward to reading the final version. And no, I wasn't stalking your blog (despite posting this comment 20 minutes after the original post - that was pure chance). I have a tech question though: do you find Word playing tricks when you have a document this long? Or does it hold its own...I have heard rumours about Word catastrophes once a document starts pushing at the boundaries of known space. James Joyce really had problems with the drafting of Ulysses. The final Harry Potter instalment reportedly had problems both in length and repetitive sentence construction, which challenged the application to break new ground in artificial intelligence (it started to develop compassion for humanity).
ReplyDeleteHa, just realised you posted this 4 days ago. It's been a big week. 0_o
ReplyDeleteDon't get me started on Word -- that is actually a good title for a future blog post. God damn thing almost ate my manuscript last week as I was crossing over the 90k word count.
ReplyDeleteLuckily I am OCD about backing up now and so restored the work with only a few sentences lost. Seriously -- every word in the document became a hashstar >> * << like that. I was like 'OMG' and then I was like 'FML' and then I was like 'Phew'
And then I like, saved my document in three other places beyond my usual nuclear bunker document failsafe plan of data management.
I seriously wish my publisher would get with the modern world, update to macs and start using pages. But alas, I am stuck with word. Just set auto save to 5 minutes and remember to manual save after every paragraph.
Haha. Funny man. I'm currently working on the largest Excel spreadsheet you have ever seen. It is approaching event horizon.
ReplyDeleteHaha. Funny man. I'm currently working on the largest Excel spreadsheet you have ever seen. It is approaching event horizon.
ReplyDelete