Skip to main content

Measuring Writing Status and Making Revision Easy On the Eyes

A pagan sun symbol with a face.
Credit: Pixabay


Well, we’re already at the first day of August and so that just says the summer is racing by! And I feel like I’ve gotten so little done with my fiction writing.

I’m several pages behind in revising my novella after I had scheduled deadlines for the completion of so many pages. But I’ve decided that I’m going to take a fellow author/blogger’s advice (I apologise, I don’t remember who it was that gave it) and write at least a page a day for those days of the week that I’ve blocked out to concentrate on my novella and just try to work out the deadline for the completion of the book as I come closer to completing it. I may even set the daily goal according to word count and so write so many words a day. That’s probably a more efficient measurement than a page count because the number of words varies from page to page.

I’m also behind on my alternate universe short story. However, I had given it a break back in the spring and only resumed revising it a few weeks ago so I can’t really say I’m stalling on that as far as summer goes. I had said a few posts back that the story’s structure was a disaster and I had to rearrange it into a chronological narrative even though the narrator’s character called for otherwise. So I put it in its chronological order and printed out a fresh hard copy for easier reading during this past week. Even though I had a bit of a hell of a time with my printer.

For some reason my printer wasn’t printing the full lines of text and so they were either coming out faded or half missing. So I had to troubleshoot it one night and because of that I didn’t get done any revisions on the story. However, I fixed the problem and it prints at least 90 percent better than it did before and so I can at least read the print more easily. Before I printed it, I made sure I took out all the strikethrough lines of those passages that I was thinking about omitting. I just made sure I saved it as another file in case I decide to use those passages after all. So I’m still revising the story but it’s a lot easier than before because it’s in chronological order now and I’m working off of a clean copy of the draft. Maybe if things go by well enough I’ll have it done by late September.

Well, I’m ending this post short so I can catch up on my fiction. But I’ll be back here Wednesday for the Insecure Writer’s Support Group! How is your reading and/or writing coming along during this summer season?

Until next time . . .

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Book-To-Movie: ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’

Credit: Wikimedia Commons I apologise for posting outside our regular post-day which is late Saturday night/early Sunday morning. However, I got behind on several things last week and so had to postpone the post to today.  I’ve been a reader of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes books ever since I was 11. What I’ve always liked so much about the series is that, like a good horror story, the stories often take place in dark settings and involve bizarre cases. Conan Doyle’s novel, “The Hound of the Baskervilles”, definitely contains these elements. It’s a detective story that crosses over into the gothic horror genre. Several movie adaptations of the novel have been made that go as far back as a 1915 German silent film. In 1959 Hammer Studios released a version starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. As much as I’m a fan of the Hammer horror films, I have not seen that one yet. The only one that I’ve seen so far is the 1939 adaptation starring that other big name in classic Bri

Book-To-Movie: ‘I Am Legend’

A vampire similar to the ones in 2008's "I Am Legend" which starred Will Smith. Credit: Pixabay.com It’s time for another Book-To-Movie review! In a Book-To-Movie, I review a book and its movie adaptations. This month’s book and its movies based on it is I Am Legend by Richard Matheson. While vampires were no longer in in the American pop culture of the the 1950s, science fiction horror in general was. So Matheson’s I Am Legend brought the scientificising of vampires into the pulp literary scene of that era. Not too long after, in the early ‘60s, the first of three book-to-movie adaptions appeared and was renamed The Last Man On Earth which starred Vincent Price. The other two were The Omega Man starring Charlton Heston in the ‘70s and I Am Legend starring Will Smith in the 2001s. Even though each one debunked the myth of the vampire as a supernatural being, each had its own depiction of the creature. ‘I Am Legend’, The Book Set in a near post-apocalyptic fu

Book-To-Movie: Stephen King’s 'The Raft'

Credit: Pixabay.com It's the third Saturday of the month and so that means it's time for another Book-To-Movie ! In a Book-To-Movie we review a book and its movie adaptation. One of the reasons I as a horror fan don’t read a lot of Stephen King’s work is because most of it consists of novels that go more than 400 pages. I have a short attention span when it comes to reading, ironically since I consider myself an avid reader, and so I normally won’t read a work that is much more than the equivalent to a 350-page mass market paperback. The other reason why I don’t read a lot of King’s work is that, as literary scholars will tell you, a lot of his writing is poor. However, he does have some good writing in his works, especially his earlier stuff, including his short horror tales. So if I read anything by Stephen King it’s usually his short stories or novellas. One of his collections I’ve read is Skeleton Crew which includes some of his good, or at least