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I have arrived late to the party in reading Birnham Wood by Eleanor Catton. I may not provide anything new in this review, therefore, but only my personal reactions to the book. The book, which borrows its title […]
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Last week I finished the first draft of the novel. I finished the last scene — that is, I filled out the final “sketch” — and called it a first draft. A bright line is useful, if for […]
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In November, I decided to “sketch” the remaining sixteen scenes in my first draft without worrying about details like verb tense or punctuating dialogue. Then in mid-December, I began the work of finishing those scenes—and I’m almost done. […]
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I spent the past week finishing the final scene of the book. The time and place for the scene were present in the primeval outline of 2021, but the contents have shifted around quite a lot as I […]
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I’m not regular about posting about what I’ve been writing, although writing happens every week as I try to meet my self-imposed deadline of finishing the first draft of a novel by the end of the year. A […]
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This was a tough writing week for me. I felt like I was trying to squeeze water from a stone. For the past two weeks I’ve been working on a pivotal scene in which I know what I […]
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I’m perhaps halfway through a first draft of the novel. That is (currently) about 79,000 words. Fifteen chapters have been completed at the draft level. Other chapters have sketches or outlines, while some are merely a virtual index […]
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A symbolic milestone for me this week: passing 70,000 words in my draft. I’ve been writing more in the last two months because I have given myself permission to write for longer than an hour each day (which […]
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Writing workshops inspire me and fill me with new ways of thinking. They also leave me with a lot of critique comments to wrestle with. For the novel WIP, I often put comments in a file for later, […]
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This week I wrote almost 1000 words on the novel draft! I’m expanding a scene that I had only included as a one-paragraph flashback. I received feedback from a couple of people that this could be its own […]
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