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A confession

February 3, 2015 by andygraham 4 Comments

Screen Shot 2015-07-28 at 14.13.42

I’ve written a book. There, it’s out in the open, I said it and now I have to go through with this. I think this is what the self-help gurus call unburdening yourself or accountability (either that or they ‘re-task’ a word for it and flog it until it’s on life-support).

Maybe I should be a bit more specific, it’s not quite a book yet. I have a bunch of words in a first draft, which the internet reliably informs me is allowed to be crap, and am trying to hammer these words into some thing vaguely respectable. I would very much like to avoid adding anything else to the tsunami I keep reading about that hit the self-publishing world a few years back.

About 52K words arrived during NaNoWriMo last year, another 40K the month after, throw in 10K I had knocking around in dusty, cobwebbed corners of my hard drive and somehow the last count stands at just over 120,000. In a way I am pleased with the numbers but it is also a little daunting. I am about a third of the way through my first edit and was under the impression that the word count should be dropping by now. I seem to have it backwards. Which worries me. A little.

The ‘easy’ solution is to split the total in two and as if by magic I would have trilogy. The problems with that are obvious; I’m not so sure it is so easy just to split a text in two (I have multiple story arcs and everything!) and I suspect the path of the rookie author* launching into an ever expanding trilogy is both well-worn and icy. I’m sure some can navigate it with ease, in my case you’ll have to to wait and see.

Lieutenant Franklin and his colleagues may not survive the impending cull but the idea will.  Something has been rattling around my head for as long as I can remember and there have been several aborted attempts in the past. It is only now that I feel ready to do something about it properly. Grabbing hold of whatever it is and forcing it out on to the page to take a bow is going to be hard but so far it has been worth every minute.

*I’m testing that term here, a bit like kids playing hockey on the freshly frozen winter ponds over here in Cz. How do they know it’s safe? Do they draw lots or just send out the least fat or most drunk? My British health and safety gene, something the Czechs seem to have had bred out of them, shudders at the mere idea of it.



Filed Under: English, NaNoWriMo, Writing

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Reader Interactions

Trackbacks

  1. NaNoWriMoNoMo | Andy Graham says:
    February 23, 2015 at 8:43 am

    […] A confession […]

    Reply
  2. Writing pain | Andy Graham says:
    May 1, 2015 at 9:17 am

    […] A confession […]

    Reply
  3. The WOT Challenge | Andy Graham says:
    July 10, 2015 at 9:51 am

    […] Writing pain | Andy Graham on A confession […]

    Reply
  4. The big red button of doom. | Andy Graham says:
    August 22, 2016 at 2:01 pm

    […] is not exactly groundbreaking news, but for me there was a big difference between writing a book, admitting I’m writing a book, and actually publishing […]

    Reply

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