Tag Archives: manuscript

Read this…or do it later, your choice.

21 Wednesday Sep 2011

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I was going to write a post about procrastination but I’ll get around to it later….only kidding! I’m not that much of a procrastinator.

But I am often tempted to procrastinate when working on my MS. One of my favourite ways to procrastinate is what I am doing right now :P

However, I have a full repertoire of procrastinate techniques which are many and varied:

• I am often lured by fb scrabble, fb zuma blitz, fb bejewelled blitz (anyone noticing a theme…?)

• I  can be found wandering into teenager’s bedrooms, cup of tea in hand, looking for a chat

• the folding of the washing will become a matter of huge importance and unable to be ignored

• my husband finds he has more cups of coffee than he can drink and ends up not doing any work himself due to my ‘popping in’ to see how he is going

• I decide I must research the origin of one word that I may or may not use in one sentence

Seriously people, I could go and on. How about you? What are your favourite ways to procrastinate? Because, obviously, I need a few more :P

Who are you most like?

11 Monday Jul 2011

Posted by in Writing Wonderings

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I read somewhere recently (I read soooo much writerly stuff, I can’t remember where it was exactly) about how, as writers, there is a little bit of ourselves in all our characters. That started me thinking and I realised that there is quite a bit of truth to that, with just a little bit of difference, for me. I see many aspects of myself within my characters. All of them, protagonist, antagonist, major, minor, have a piece of me that is there, naturally, because they came from inside my brain.

The other thing I noticed when ruminating about this topic, is that they also have a lot about them that I wish I had. My current protagonist is gentle, kind and thoughtful but can seriously kick some butt when she needs to. I’d like to be a little more like that. My other main character is headstrong, fiercely loyal and sometimes over-zealous. And  I could use a bit more of those traits sometimes too.

I think the reason we find it hard to let go of our characters (and the reason so many authors feel a certain amount of grief at the completion of a manuscript – hopefully I will feel that someday!) is that there is so much of ‘us’ in them. Our good bits, our bad bits and all the things in between that we ‘wish’ we were like; they’re all there.

How about you? Do you relate more to one of your characters than another? Do you see more of yourself in that one? Or less?

Just do it!

04 Saturday Jun 2011

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The copywriters for nike certainly knew what they were doing back in the day when ‘just do it’ was their slogan. I must confess to have stolen it for my own private use in my motivational speeches to my self :)

I have felt stalled in the writing of my MS (manuscript) for some time now but have been wanting to pick up the threads of my fantasy story and continue writing. I feel quite awful for my characters who have been in a state of limbo for some months now!

A writerly quote I came across recently was “The first draft doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be written.” I love that.

As my main role in life work-wise is editing, I find it very hard to just write and not edit as I go along. Now, a certain amount of that is okay, I guess, but when you combine that with my slightly perfectionist side, what it actually amounts to is not much writing getting done. Lots of ‘select and delete’ but not much to show for a couple hours in front of the screen.

So, a couple of nights ago, I organised myself with red wine, laptop, music of choice (Guns n Roses) and sat down to write. If it wasn’t for the constant reminder that it didn’t need to be perfect, just written, I never would have managed to write over a thousand words on my MS. And, boy, did it feel good.

Hopefully, if I join my two mantras together, I will get much more writing done over the coming months :)