Big Print Job
Posted March 9, 2010 – 6:07 am in: Journal, StillwaterI finished the major revisions to my novel the other day. I’ve been doing the editing on my laptop computer, keeping track of my progress on a pad of paper. I find that written lists are easier to maintain than electronic lists.There’s something intimidating about having a written list of things to do, and the [...]
No Comments | Tags:Book Update
Posted March 5, 2010 – 1:03 pm in: StillwaterI’ve been very busy the past week with some serious editing and rewriting in a portion of my novel. Several years ago, I introduced a new character at the beginning of the book. The new character, and the scene he appeared in, caused me to add an entire chapter. This chapter took the place of [...]
No Comments | Tags:The Novel
Posted January 21, 2010 – 9:49 pm in: StillwaterI ran a word count on my novel and today it is composed of 146,573 words, 655,933 characters (not counting spaces), 802,245 characters including spaces, and 11,606 lines. The “characters including spaces” number means that I hit 802,245 keys on the computer to produce the text. This wasn’t done, however, until I had handwritten the [...]
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Posted January 4, 2010 – 7:26 am in: StillwaterI’m working this morning on Page 302 out of a total of 469 pages. The number of pages fluctuates as I perform the editing. Sometimes I add words and sentences and paragraphs. Other times, I delete stuff I’ve written and leave it out altogether or add replacement text.
The old tobacco barn on the grounds of [...]
Book Update #9
Posted December 10, 2009 – 6:31 am in: StillwaterIvan Stetler has confronted Delmar Stephens in The Barn. After a shouting match and a facedown, Stephens walked out, leaving Ivan and the boys to themselves. I revised this scene to take into consideration Ivan’s mangled leg. My first draft or two was rather bland, with nothing more than minor insults flung back and forth. [...]
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Posted November 5, 2009 – 7:26 am in: StillwaterIt has taken me several weeks to make my way through Chapter 6 to Chapter 7. I’m still not entirely happy with 6 and think that I’ll have to return and make more revisions after slogging through the remainder of the story.
Chapter 7 begins in October of 1913. George Belt enters 10th Grade. He [...]
Book Update #7
Posted October 22, 2009 – 5:53 am in: StillwaterMy book is about the early days of basketball in Northern Indiana. As one might imagine, some research is mandatory before even starting a novel about a time period that’s different from the one the writer resides in. I did much research for my novel before I had even considered writing a novel about the [...]
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Posted October 14, 2009 – 8:55 pm in: StillwaterI’ve hit a minor roadblock in the story. Having broken Ivan’s leg and caused a substantial permanent disability for him, I now have to adjust things a bit to get the story back on track. The issue at hand is in the handling of Ivan’s immediate and long term reaction to the disability. An entire [...]
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Posted October 8, 2009 – 9:39 pm in: StillwaterI knew this would happen, but it’s still hard to deal with.
Think about writing a first draft of a novel. You have a plot, whether you planned it carefully or you just let it happen as you write. Whichever the case, by the time you write the last sentence, you have a story with a [...]
Book Update #5
Posted October 2, 2009 – 9:58 pm in: StillwaterI solved a major problem yesterday.
I’ve been conflicted for years over the character of Ivan Stetler. I won’t bother going into much detail about this conflict, except to say that it hinged on his character status in the book. As the coach of basketball and baseball, and player of most sports, he could easily become [...]