Good advice!

From Neil Gaiman's blog:

"The second draft is where the fun is. In a first draft, you get to explode. The objective (at least for me) is to get it down on paper, somehow. Battle through the laziness and the not-enough-time and the this-is-rubbish and everything else, and just get it written. Whatever it takes. The second draft is where you go and gather together the fragments of the explosion and figure out what it is you did, and make it look like that was what you always meant to do.

So you write it. Then you put it aside. Not for months, but perhaps for a week or so. Even a few days. Do other things. Then set aside some uninterrupted time to read, and pull it out, and pretend you have never read it before -- clear it out of your head, and sit and read it. (I'd suggest you do this on a print-out, so you can scribble on it as you go. )

When you get to the end you should have a much better idea of what it was about than you did when you started. (I knew The Graveyard Book would be about a boy who lived in a graveyard when I started it. I didn't know that it would be about how we make our families, though: that's a theme that made itself apparent while the book was being written.)

And then, on the second and subsequent drafts, you do four things. 1) You fix the things that didn't work as best you can (if you don't like the climactic Rock City scene in American Gods, trust me, the first draft was so much worse). 2) You reinforce the themes, whether they were there from the beginning or whether they grew like Topsy on the way. You take out the stuff that undercuts those themes. 3) You worry about the title. 4) At some point in the revision process you will probably need to remind yourself that you could keep polishing it infinitely, that perfection is not an attribute of humankind, and really, shouldn't you get on with the next thing now?"

"Thank you both for coming."

Happy Tuesday .... and take a look at this hilarious article on the 'Novelists' Strike' ...

Stuck in the middle

Every writer knows the horrors of the middle - that vast, tangled mess that is the meat of your novel. Here is a great article by Jim Butcher on how to combat the GSM (Great Swampy Middle), as he calls it.

Thank God I'm (semi)past this stage ...

Making stuff

Total word count: 46,000
Today's word count: 1,500
Cups of coffee: six!
What's playing: Nothing. I spent most of the day watching Audrey Hepburn films, as predicted earlier, and all the work I've done has been in the last hour.

I really admire people who make things. Anything, from art to glass to furniture to fantastic meals to little carved wooden bears (to choose a very random example). Our culture is so focused on the acquisition of stuff. We go to any shop and there are shelves and shelves of Stuff just sitting there ready to be bought. We don't see the work that goes into them, and most of them are mass-produced and made by machine anyway. There is satisfaction in owning something handmade by a real, flesh-and-blood person, perhaps even someone you can meet or talk to.

One of my resolutions for this year was to learn dress-making. There is a freedom in being able to make your own clothes. What you wear isn't dictated just by what's fashionable and what's in the shops - you can create your own style and wear one-off things that no one else has. And if you see beautiful fabric, you can actually make it into something rather than just staring at it with vague longing.

It would be great to be self-sufficient, too. When we lived in Zimbabwe, we had a vegetable garden, egg-laying chickens, herbs, fruit trees and nut trees. We could grow a lot of our own food. I would love to live like that again one day. Planting a small herb garden in our tiny back yard would be a good start, and I'd like to do that this year.

Anyway, here are some awesomely creative people whose blogs I have been following for inspiration (and don't get put off by the word 'craft' - it doesn't have to be all tea cosies shaped like cats):

Posy Gets Cozy - various cool crafts and a beautiful site.
Art Junk Girl - an artist who does collage work that I really love.
Dress a Day - this is a dressmaking blog I've been reading for years.