30/05/2017 - A Writing Holiday

As you can probably tell, I don't blog much.

This is mainly because I have limited concentration for writing, so when I write, I want to be working on useful stuff. Right now, this means my books. But I'm on a little holiday from my current book, so I thought I'd do an update.

Why am I on a holiday?

That's an excellent question, voice in my head. I've been doing a writing course, that's why.

Why have you been doing a writing course?

Another excellent question.

I keep making elementary mistakes.

Well, that's a little harsh. Basically, my second novel, Confessions Of A Gentleman Arachnid, was a bloody mess when I first wrote it. It was only because I got a very talented editor on board that it turned out to be anything other than shockingly terrible. I learned a lot through doing that.

So, once Confessions was done, I tried to write a follow up to my first book: The Unexpected Death Of A Soldier. This did not work. This was mainly because I was trying to do a send-up of the story from the first Mass Effect game (this is too long a story to go into now) and it really just fell apart.

I then wrote the sequel to Confessions, the first page of which is down this blog somewhere.

I then hit a few road blocks.

I'd wanted to write a young adult novel for a while, so I tried to write one. After about four months, it became obvious that I had 45,000 words that had some potential, but was mainly one massive mess. So I wrote something else. This was... okay, but also had some pretty serious problems. I then wrote another thing. That's what I'm working on now.

This project (currently called 'Can Anyone Hear Me?' - I'm terrible at naming things) is going... mmm... it's going decently. But I reasoned that I kept... making... mistakes. Mostly to do with character motivation and narrative flow, so I decided to do a writing course.

Writing courses are quite interesting things. The one I'm on runs for twelve weeks and is done online. I was signed up for an in person one but I switched over. My disability was playing up and I didn't think I'd be able to attend the classes. Online is nice anyway. You chat with your peers on a little forum thing and watch videos of your teacher lecturing you.

The teaching so far has been... fine. I haven't really learned a whole lot but we'll see how things progress. The interesting stuff has been the round robin of feedback the course takes part in.

Every week, three students submit a three thousand word section from their work for the group to provide feedback on. You get feedback from the tutor as well as fourteen other people.

It's a quick and easy way of getting a lot of opinions very quickly, which is super useful.

The feedback I got on the stuff I've submitted so far was mostly wonderful. Glaring flaws I had not noticed were identified whilst some sections of my work were universally praised. That made me pretty happy.

What I found interesting was the massive variation of quality of the work on the course. Some students are really damned good. Others are writing at sub fan-fiction levels. This, it turns out, is actually quite useful. I've taken to reading people's feedback and checking their work to see if I should be taking their advice or not. I listen to the good writers more than I listen to the bad ones.

That said, a good point is a good point, no matter who makes it.

Anyway, I was implementing this feedback on my book. I'd been working on it pretty solidly for about three weeks. I find editing exhausting and frustrating. I was getting worse and worse at it. I'd started skipping sections and had largely managed to forget what I was supposed to be keeping an eye out for. So I decided to go on a one week holiday and here we are. Here is me, blogging. BLOGGING I SAY.

If I do some more of this, I might do something more interesting than just talk about my life. Maybe.