Tag Archives: Revision

Writing

Author’s journal: Back to revision

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Photo credit: Burst. Unsplash license.

This is the week I turned back to the keyboard. Narration practice is on pause, because my readers’ critiques are in. Most of them relate to typos, but some have to do with plot elements. I’m working now, thanks to a good suggestion, on weaving a small plot thread into one section, which ought to improve… the tone, I guess. It’ll make an underused character stronger, and give them a way to help advance the story. (I can’t afford to pay my characters to just loaf around, chapter after chapter!)

I’m still getting up at 6:30 am to get my writing time in, though my body has instituted base countermeasures. In order to prevent me getting more than six (sometimes four) hours of sleep at night, it’s moved my natural wake-up time back to 5:00 a.m. I suppose I could get up and write then, but I have no doubt my body would then start waking me at 4:00, and it would just be a war of retreat by inches, until I became fully nocturnal.

I saw a clip of Jordan Peterson, who has, I understand, adopted a carnivore diet. He said he’s gotten good results against depression by telling his patients to eat a high-protein breakfast shortly after waking up in the morning. I’ve been putting breakfast off till I got back from the gym (gym comes after writing, that’s the schedule) at about 9:00. So I’ll try Peterson’s way now. This morning I had my breakfast sausage first thing instead of later. We’ll see how that goes.

Otherwise, I have a deadline coming up the first of May for the small magazine I’m editing, and I suspect it’s be a nail-biter getting it all done on time.

Right now, my hopes and dreams are focused on getting into May. I figure things will ease up in May.

Come to think of it, that’s what I said about April.

Authors, The Press, Writing

3 things: Chapel, Mano, and red ink

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Three items for you tonight. The video above, in case you care to view it, is my sermon last Thursday in the chapel of the Free Lutheran Bible College and Seminary in Plymouth, Minnesota. I note that it times out at 17 minutes, 57 seconds. The time frame they allotted me was 18 minutes. I did no padding or cutting on the sermon – it was the right length pretty much out of the chute. This is something I seem to have been born able to do, writing to a set time. I find it wholly inexplicable. Anybody know a politician who needs a speech writer? I work cheap. Preferably a conservative; I hate being a greater hypocrite than I already am.

Secondly, our friend Dave Lull, ever on the watch for references to the late author D. Keith Mano, for whom I cherish a fondness, sent me the link to this piece from National Review. An excerpt:

Keith was soon established within our senior ranks and was included in the periodic “off-sites,” where vexed NR policies were (endlessly) debated and (occasionally) resolved. He and I would sit together, two high-school sophomores in the back row of an algebra class, with D. Keith providing sotto voce commentary on the otherwise tedious proceedings. On one occasion I lost it and laughed out loud. NR publisher William Rusher, who on solemn occasions made himself available for hall-monitor duty, barked at us from across the room, “Perhaps Freeman and Mano would care to share that witticism with the rest of the group.” (We did not care to share it. It was about Rusher.)

Thirdly: Report from the writing front: I’m in the process of doing a paper revision on The Baldur Game. It’s well known that I’ve been almost entirely assimilated by the digital Borg; I read and write mostly electronically. Yet I retain a semi-superstitious conviction that I ought to do at least one revision per book in red pen on printed sheets. That’s what I’m doing right now.

And you know what? It does seem to be different on paper. I almost feel as if I’ve re-written the book by hand, in red ink. (Some of it’s even almost legible.)

I had thought the polishing stage was almost complete on this thing. I was surprised find so much substandard writing all of a sudden, like shining ultraviolet light on a crime scene. I’ve never noticed any difference in the reading experience between paper books and my Kindle. Yet revision, somehow, seems to be different.