Monday, October 18, 2004
Literary Advancement
I didn’t feel as if my day started until I decided to walk home. The office was dead as usual all day and the coffee gave me heartburn which didn’t help. I was lucky in that the rain that had been on and off all afternoon stayed off for most of my journey home, and only started again when I walked up the path to my house.
I checked my email and took a look at Heart of a Child. This is a short story I wrote a while ago and submitted to the Bridport Prize Competition, and now that the winners have been decided I took another look at it with a view to sending it back out into the world. Within the first two lines I spotted several very obvious errors, and so I ended up reworking the entire story.
Since I first wrote it, I have settled into a flow of writing I am happy with, I have found my writing voice, and when I revise prose now I pick up on certain things far quicker that I know should not be there: the words had, that, was etc. POV changes and reversed sentences. I picked them all out and generally gave it an overhaul with a bit of restructuring to give it more of an impacting beginning.
It is a sign of how far I have come since first writing it, and now it is an even tighter piece of work. I would be ashamed to send it out as it was, and I wonder to myself how many more changes I will make to it if I go back to it a year from now.
Then I got into HJ and completed off Issue 21. It’s all getting very dramatic and I now have issues 18 thru 21 to get sent off to my editor – have to force myself to say that, “my editor”. It’s a writing thing.
The Soprano’s was superb tonight and there are only three more episodes to go. It's one of the very few programmes on the telly that I actually watch with interest, and it is about to end. Such a shame as it is so addictive. I love how the writers work in real life to the script; Tony fondly remembering his mate John – as in John Gotti. Superb stuff.
I checked my email and took a look at Heart of a Child. This is a short story I wrote a while ago and submitted to the Bridport Prize Competition, and now that the winners have been decided I took another look at it with a view to sending it back out into the world. Within the first two lines I spotted several very obvious errors, and so I ended up reworking the entire story.
Since I first wrote it, I have settled into a flow of writing I am happy with, I have found my writing voice, and when I revise prose now I pick up on certain things far quicker that I know should not be there: the words had, that, was etc. POV changes and reversed sentences. I picked them all out and generally gave it an overhaul with a bit of restructuring to give it more of an impacting beginning.
It is a sign of how far I have come since first writing it, and now it is an even tighter piece of work. I would be ashamed to send it out as it was, and I wonder to myself how many more changes I will make to it if I go back to it a year from now.
Then I got into HJ and completed off Issue 21. It’s all getting very dramatic and I now have issues 18 thru 21 to get sent off to my editor – have to force myself to say that, “my editor”. It’s a writing thing.
The Soprano’s was superb tonight and there are only three more episodes to go. It's one of the very few programmes on the telly that I actually watch with interest, and it is about to end. Such a shame as it is so addictive. I love how the writers work in real life to the script; Tony fondly remembering his mate John – as in John Gotti. Superb stuff.
Colin 11:08 pm