Crusade For Vengeance

Slowly but surely Crusade is coming along.  The edit is complete and I'm working through the amendments.  Two more days and I think they'll be be done.  I'll then print it a third time and do a final read through.  I'm not going to hit my 31st of Oct publishing date but I'm happier with a better product.

I found something interesting during my editing.  I used 'had' 1,932 times and 'that' 1616.  When I looked at them, I saw they weren't necessary or I should be using words like used, needed, were, etc instead.  I'm currently on page 174 out of 275 and I am down to 1154 hads.  It makes a big difference.  I need to go through Reason for them as well.  That's got over 2,000 hads.

On the TV front, I now have ten programs recording on a Thursday:

Star Wars Rebels
Quantum Leap (They started re-running it from episode one this week)
Arrow
The Big Bang Theory (must see)
Defiance
Scandal
Forever
Franklyn & Bash
Scorpian
Dominon

That's a lot.  I haven't seen Dominon yet so it might not stay.

If anyone is interested, I have the following also recording during the week.

Gotham (must see)
Have I Got More News For You
The Flash
The Apprentice
Sleepy Hollow
The Apprentice: You're Fired
Legends
The Last Ship
Agents of Shield
The Blacklist (must see)
The F1 Show
Doctor Who
Hawai 5.0

Now I just need to fit it in around my writing!

Crusade For Vengeance

I've been slogging on.  Another 70 pages edited today.  It's hard work.  Every half an hour or so I need to tell myself to stick with it and keep going.

I hit a dead spot at about 11.00 am yesterday and came to a grinding halt.  It took me five hours to get back into it.  At least I didn't do that today.

On a positive note I finally found the answer to a conundrum that had been haunting me for weeks.  A friend pointed out the below sentance from Reason.


"If they were lucky Deni or Hanna would have time to give Tern’s name but if they were unlucky or more accurately unprepared they would be incapacitated before they could enact their Bosses protection."

He said my use of enact was incorrect.  After looking into it I found he was right but for the life of me, I couldn't think of the word I should use.  I stumbled across it today - invoke.

I'll have that changed in my updated version.

Crusade For Vengeance

Sorry for the lack of posts recently.  I've been editing Crusade and to be honest, it's a bit boring, NOT THE BOOK!  The editing.  So nothing to report.

It's coming along though and I've learnt more about it as I go.  My first pass through the book took about a week in total.  I really enjoyed reading it cover to cover, there were only a handful of plot points to iron out and I thought I'd caught most, if not all the mechanical errors.

Yeah, I was falling myself.  Plot wise, I still stand by it.  Mechanically?  Not a chance.  I'm on my second, much more thorough run through and I'm finding a lot.  Some of it simply word choice.  I use had, as and so far too much.  Most of the time I only need to remove them and it reads a lot better.

Fortunately Eve Online sent me a 10 day free pass.  I haven't played it for two years.  I'm not playing it while working, well not properly.  I'm just sending my ship out to mine Ice or asteroids.  The ship can do it without my intervention for an hour at a time.  Then all I need to do is a quick pop into a space station which takes two minutes.  It's just something to have on the screen and keep me sane.

I saw a good example of why you need to be careful on social media earlier.  Someone on twitter posted an article from an American website saying that Banksy had been arrested and his identity released.  I was shocked by this and wanted to post it myself.  I'm English, so I wanted to use an article from the BBC.  Nothing on their site, very strange.  After Googling it, I discovered it was all fake.

Don't believe everything you see on the net!  Wow, isn't that profound and unoriginal.

Dark Vengeance

Not much to report for the last couple of days.  I've been reading a far amount about how to write and edit along with catching up on the last month or so of Writing Excuses podcasts.  I'd certainly recommend those for any budding writer, they have some good stuff in.

I've been kicking around some ideas for book three today.  The first couple of chapters are locked in for now along with the crescendo ending to the trilogy.  I don't have any hook though to drive the story to that point.  It's early days, I'll keep working on it.

In the meantime I may well be getting a visit from the Police.  I've just spent some time researching how you make gun powder online for a story idea.  It's one that has been kicking round my head for almost six months now.  Gunpowder/muskets isn't anything new, I know.  Some excellent writers have already done it.  Promise of Blood by Brian McClellan is a good example that I would recommend people check out.

For the record I had my idea before I saw anything that had already been released.  I think my take on it is unique and hopefully it still will be once I've gotten round to writing it!

Crusade For Vengeance

The first set of amendments for Crusade are now all done and I filled in the plot hole I mentioned in the last post.  The first draft is now off to my friends to take apart and let me know what they think!  It should be interesting.

One of my mates sent me back his work on Reason a couple of days ago and I inputted all of them into my master copy as well.  Nothing plot related at all, it seems I missed a lot of commas and apostrophes.  Sorry to everyone who had bought that, the good news is that Amazon updates automatically and 80% of my customers have used that route.  I plan to do those updates along with a few other bits and pieces to tidy it up later this month before releasing Crusade.

I do feel guilty about it.  My defence is that I'm learning as I go and I will continue to improve my work all the time.

That is the agenda for tomorrow.  I've got some books and websites along with Writing Excuses to catch up on.

Right now I'm going to do the vacuuming before dinner.  Great fun!

Crusade For Vengeance

I had a bad review on Friday and it really threw me.  I've heard people talk about this and I must admit that I thought I wouldn't be effected by it all that much.  I was very wrong, it really destroyed my confidence and I couldn't write or even edit all day, hence no updates since Thursday.

After a good weekend with my daughter and spending some quality time down the pub with a couple of good mates I was back on an even keel, well mostly.  After a late start yesterday I got on with the editing and completed another hundred pages until I hit a bit of a bump.  I suddenly realised that I'd contradicted myself on how a life worked.  I had the enemy switch off the power and then a chapter later the heroes move it.  Sounds minor but when I started looking at it some more, every solution I came up with snowballed into a half dozen other things that happen later on.

I've been thinking about this all of yesterday afternoon, evening and this morning.  Fortunately what I think to be the solution came to me in the shower a few minutes ago.  Now I need to re-write a few passages but it shouldn't be too much.

The plan is to have the first edit done by the end of the day and then I can get started on some revisions of Reason based on feedback I've had.  Nothing major, mainly just tidying up.

Crusade For Vengeance

I'm pleased with today's progress.  I completed the read through and only found some minor structural stuff.  Bits like timings and talking points that haven't been closed off.  It should all be fixable tomorrow I hope.

I really need to do some exercise in the morning.  Aside from my weekly karate and moving some boxes on Monday, I haven't done any for five weeks now.  It's been too long and I need to pick it up again.  I'll try and motivate myself for a run tomorrow.  I'm not holding out much hope though.

On the agenda for tomorrow will be:

Finish the amendments
Spell check (yes, I haven't done this yet.)
Catch up on the Writing Excuses.
Start reading Shadows Beneath - a very interesting book by four published authors who I like to read and listen to on the above Writing Excuses.  They've each written a short story and included the 1st draft and final versions.  It should be some good insights.

Crusade For Vengeance

I've had a few days off including some time to help my sister move house which was time well spent.  Except for yesterday though.  After a hectic couple of days moving I thought I'd take the morning to play Empire: Total War and start work after lunch.  Yeah, that didn't happen.  I made the mistake of watching an episode of the West Wing with lunch and it was so good I watched another, then another, then another...  You're seeing where this went.  I stopped watching at 11pm, so much for will power.

Never mind, that was September and the plan was always to spend October editing.

Here we are 1st of October and may the editing commence.

Commence it did.  I printed out the manuscript for the first time and that is a great thing to see.  A word or page count on a screen does not have nearly the same impact as seeing the pages sitting, all together stacked up on your desk.

After absorbing that wonderful sight for a few minutes I got to work.  My writing is certainly cleaner this time with a lot less mechanical issues.  It helped that a friend had already taken a look at the first half and I'd been doing the morning re-through of the previous days work.

I did 158 pages today and I'm very pleased with the result.  I haven't found any structural issues and aside for some conversations that feel they need bulking up it's looking good.  Of course that might just be my rose tinted writers eyes.

For Reason I personnally did two editing runs with three more done by my Mum, Rich and Graham.  Hopefully they'll be up for doing it again along with my friend Stuart.   For Crusade I'm hoping, time permitting to do four runs at it myself.

I am interested to see how many errors I will find in that final run.