Xavier Edwards's Blog, page 2

Reworking Dialogue

The big work on my editing this week was focussed on dialogue. What I had originally written had felt stilted and disjointed and I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was in the exchanges that was wrong. I was beginning to think that I was going to have to throw out a couple of chapters of my book and start them over again, when I finally managed to find the flow that I knew was there between the characters. There are a couple of earlier chapters in the book which might yet still need a rewrite, despite having gone through editing a couple of times over.

Another benefit to improving the flow of the dialogue is that it made the characters more three-dimensional and believable. I hadn’t set out to create my characters as cut-outs, but I couldn’t get the feel that they were alive from the pre-edited version. This was a big problem, as one of the characters has had a life-changing trauma take place a matter of hours before the discussion, but I couldn’t get the feel that they were anything more than flat through their words. Where was the terror? Where was the fatigue? Where was the emotion at having just seen their life completely change?

Thankfully, after the editing (and some rewriting) I have a couple of characters that the reader gets emotionally invested in. For someone who avoided dialogue like the plague for much of their early writing, getting things working again between characters in a conversation is a relief.

It also helped show what was wrong with my original version of the manuscript -- I knew something was off, just not what it was.

I’m thinking that, while the improvements have been great up to this point, that there is probably another two rounds of editing to follow before I’m happy that I’ve got this particular (very much non-Erotica) story tied down.

Time and Energy

Research and editing over the last few weeks has been a battle of energy and time. When I have the energy to get into the writing, I don’t have the time. When I have the time, I don’t have the energy. I have been making slow progress, so it’s still good steps forward. No timelines, though -- they’re for later on. I do want to have more than a snatched couple of hours here, couple of hours there, to get in and do things. As long as those scattered hours remain the time I get, I’ll just have to make the most of what I can do with them.

In the middle of it all, I had my main writing computer take an unexpected nosedive after a system update refused to take. Hours of effort to get the system back online were wasted, and I was worried that I was going to have lost absolutely everything...

Thankfully, my backup hard drive had been quietly working away in the background over the last few months, and I had what appeared to be a perfectly good backup that was only a few hours old prior to the corrupted update. A nervous night of waiting followed as it slowly rebuilt my system but, come the next morning I had my old system back and running again. Only a couple of minor things had been forgotten when the rebuild took place, but the important thing was that I had all of my writing and archived research back.

I took the opportunity to update some of the software in my writing workflow, which I really should have done prior to attempting the system-wide update, but I had the opportunity to fix things with a relatively clean slate.

Reading and Editing

There’s not a lot to report of late, other than I continue to be keeping myself busy with reading and editing. It doesn’t seem like the research is ever going to end and, at the same time, it feels like the editing is never going to end. With all the changes that are being made to the script, to give it back the natural voice it had been missing, it’s getting quite a work-over and I can see why it wasn’t going places in its original form.

The story is still there, but it now has a spark of life being breathed into it. Another couple of rounds of editing and it might be ready for others to look at it. It’s something that I do eventually want to see, but it’s also something that is going to be carefully undertaken. There’s no point racing into something (even with as much time as I’ve taken to write it) and releasing it only half-done, particularly if it isn’t going to be a very well written half.

I’m keeping plugging away, and I get the feeling that there are a couple of things bubbling away under the surface that might come out as short stories, but I don’t know when they’re going to be in a format that’s ready for others to see. Here’s to another couple of weeks of work, to see what can come out of it at the end.

Continuing to Write

I’ve been working on and off over the last couple of weeks on editing. There’s nothing sexy about not writing, but it is an important part of making the written word ready for publishing. I’ve been finding more and more parts of what I’d written where my voice had effectively disappeared, and I’d been wondering why the manuscript hadn’t been flowing that well. It does feel good to be putting that natural flow back into the storyline, and it is making the manuscript much easier to read.

I’m still spending a lot of time researching for other projects, but I think I’m nearly ready to put pen to paper, or at least fingers to keyboard, and getting the fun stuff underway. I’m not sure how long those projects will take, but it could be something that is around six to twelve months in development.

Always a Reason to Write

I was wallowing in some self-pity a couple of weeks ago, pouting about not wanting to write, edit, or do much other than sleep, when I got a rather nice set of emails. In the past these emails would have arrived as registered letters in the mail, but I suppose we all have to get with the times.

They were royalty payments.

More than I was expecting, too, which made an already nice surprise very pleasing.

I’d almost forgotten that with my books out and about that people could still go and buy them, and read them. I’d been too long away from my active promotion and engagement to really remember that my books had lives of their own. Oops.

It was a good reminder that people still want to read what I put out, and that I should shake off the delay in getting my editing work completed so I can publish again.

Editing hasn’t been the only thing I’ve been doing, though. I’ve also gone back to some of my earlier drafts and added more elements into them, hopefully fleshing out the scripts into something more readable and enjoyable over the long term.

Time has also been devoted to pondering how I’m going to publish my next book. It’s so far out of my normal writing genre that I’m worried it might not be received well by my current fans, but I’m also not sure that it really needs to go out under a pen name. There’s got to be some extra thought to be put into how I go forward with that particular issue.

Historic manuscripts and drafts aside, I’ve also been busy setting the foundations for another writing project. It is something that has come about from last year’s massive writing job and, if I want more time to write on things I really want to write, then I probably need to follow the thread on this particular task and see where it goes. I haven’t written much for it as yet, even though it is subject matter that I know fairly well. I’ve been stuck with research and literature reviews, and have even more books than normal scattered around than I normally do. Even with all of that going on, I’ve actually been more busy doing the research and literature review on electronic documents and have come to love the ease by which I can highlight, annotate, and otherwise capture pertinent information from an electronic book, than I can do with my precious dead tree copies (and I’ve been really busy buying up lots of those lately, too).

So, on days when I feel like I’m not achieving much - when the editing never seems to go anywhere, or the historic drafts don’t move forward, or I’m not making a dent in my massive to be read pile (pleasure AND research), and I struggle to remember the last time I achieved any forward progress, I know that the real progress and results are happening in a non-visible form.

Which direction the next few weeks are going to head in, I don’t know, but I am ready for any direction.

Editing and Editing

I’ve been busy when I can over the last couple of weeks, though not much in terms of new writing.

Instead, I’ve been busy turning a previously drafted work into something more polished and ready for publishing. Since it’s been so long that I sat down with the manuscript, I’ve been seeing it through some really new eyes (even if I know intimately what’s going to happen from line to line).

I’d long known that there was something off with the script, and it wasn’t just that it wasn’t an erotica piece. Though the editing process, I’ve found that what had really been missing was the natural voice that my prose can carry. It felt forced and unnatural in far too many places, and the editing has been showing me that I might have lost the touch there for a little bit (at least from what I consider an appropriate standard of authorship). At least I’m getting to weed out the difficult and awkwardly written sections and replace them with something that is more in line with what I had been thinking when I tried to write the story.

I’m beginning to hope that I can get this little bit of steam going into something much stronger, and not bother about chasing word counts or anything silly like that - just to focus on getting great stories written with at least a high standard of writing skill.

The next few weeks will show which way this is going to go, but I am hopeful it will be a good direction. Now, to start re-engaging with my readers again.

Still Alive

I was recently sitting around wondering why it felt like I hadn’t done much writing of late. It wasn’t until I looked at my last site update that I saw just how long that it has been since I’ve done any writing of significance. I wish I could say that I’ve been enjoying the time away from writing and having a wonderful break, but that wouldn’t be true. Things have just been extraordinarily busy and I didn’t realise that I hadn’t been writing.

Now that I’ve found the time to be able to sit down and look at things again, I’m hoping that there’s going to be some more opportunities to get back to my characters and their stories.

This might only be a short update, but it’s an important one -- I’m back to my writing again, and going to make something of it.

It Has Been a While

Well...

It’s been a little longer than I had been expecting -- away from my normal weekly updates. Firstly, everything is still okay. I’m still writing. Just, not very much of late.

I’ve been meaning to sit down and get things back into full swing again, but there’s always something else dragging time and attention away from being able to write. I’m having to be more choosy about where my precious spare time is allocated and, at the moment, that time is being given over to reading, with some editing work in there as well.

On the positive side, I am getting to read more in genre than I have in the past, and it has been interesting to see how erotica used to look -- particularly that which has been written by women. If nothing else, it is interesting to see the style and content being applied to the stories, and their effect on the reader. It is also reinforcing to me that I don’t want to jump back into the publishing game too quickly, even with something short and sweet / sexy.

I’ll keep plugging away, and will hope to have something ready to go before too long.

Happy reading.

Love is in the Air

It’s been a tumultuous last few weeks. We’ve been moving house, then the computer with all my website data on it died and it took longer than expected to be ready again, and then we’ve been dealing with all the fun of the new school year for the kids. At times, it seemed like anything that was outside of the immediate hassle of getting through the day was going to be not worth the effort.

It’s all coming slowly back to normal, even if there are more moving boxes left than I remember. Valentine’s Day is also rapidly coming upon us, so there’s more things that need attention in the immediate term, and it’s important to make sure that they take my full attention. There are plans to keep pressing ahead with writing and editing work, and I want to get a couple of shorter stories out, just to keep things ticking over. I’m probably going to focus more on releasing a longer work this year, but it’s still important to keep the shorter stories going. At least with the computer all back alive again I’ve got all my drafts and stories back. Yes, I had full backups, but it’s not the same as having the originals back.

A Fresh Start to a New Year

After quite a hectic 2014, I’m back in the seat again for 2015. The break over Christmas and the New Year was very welcome, and I’m looking forward to getting some good writing done this year, particularly as the major side work projects from last year are now well and truly behind me.

2015 is already off to a good start, as I’m the January Hottie for the ‘Some Like it Hot’ group on GoodReads. I’ve also got a range of ideas for what storylines I’m going to be working on this year. A good break has led to some great ideas, but it has also meant that my writing time has been taken up by all manner of other distractions. The effort now is to go and make the time to write, again.

The resolution for 2015 is to spend more time writing and publishing, and it’s one that I’m really keen to get in and get on with.