Documentary of a Failure

Draft 4? Wow, this little project just keeps chugging along. I’m guessing that it will go to at least Draft 6. Draft 4, Part 1 is now in the hands of my wife. It’s roughly the first 20% of the book. She’s about 1/3 of the way into it and has had a lot of great feedback. She gives me hope that the book might actually make sense to someone other than myself when this is all over.

To format and print the previous drafts I had used an old version of Microsoft Word. I have a rebuilt computer and could not reinstall the program. So, I’m now an openOffice user. It’s much like Word, except that it’s free. Good news for me. So I am now working in openOffice instead of a .rtf editor ( for more info: writing )

I’ve been side tracked and haven’t made any progress with either the hand editing or the digital inputs of the previous hand edits.  It’s my intention to keep pace with my wife so she can get through her edit without waiting on me.  I’ll then take her edit, make notes on it for me, and make another sweeping change to the text.

I hope by the end of that to have most of editing done.

Nope, I’m not going backwards.  With my wife off from work with the baby, she finds herself with time to edit the GIANT.  So, I’ve started entering my latest round of edits n the computer.  I’m going to print out the first chunk of the book (which could stand alone as it’s own short story) for her to edit.

I’m finding that the input of the edits is going quicker than I thought.  Much faster than it took to make them in the first place.

I’m also finding that I glossed over some paragraphs on my edit.  Hopefully this was just the first few pieces that I wasn’t on the ball.  Good thing that my wife will be there for a pass too.  Plus, I’m going to take at least another comprehensive on screen look at the piece.  I had originally not wanted to do that, but it’s the only way to generate a solid product.  The better the product the better chance of success.

Or the more time that I waste on something no one will ever read?  I could see it going both ways - I’m feeling more positive about the book - despite having no real education or training in writing.

I made it! Back to editing. I didn’t make it off of the page I had left off with. It was hard to get back into that mindset, so I ended up skipping around a bit, reading other parts and making small corrections here and there.

I’m going to employ a new strategy and start digitizing the edits I have made so my wife can do her own edit of a clean and revised copy. I’m hoping she can give me some insight into the whole thing. Hopefully I’m not horribly off base with this whole thing. We shall see.

The 4 plus weeks away have been benefitial. I’ve realized that I need to twist around the story a bit. The book builds to a final even sort of moment at the end, but I don’t think I’ve done such a good job of selling it to the reader. I’m not sure if the average person would be son invested in the thing. I don’t want them to get there and say ’so what’.

Three members of the family that is. My wife and I’s first child was born three weeks ago. I have purposely kept most personal events away from this. I don’t want it to become a personal blog. But the birth of my child will have a big impact on the GIANT. I haven’t touched the latest draft since her birth. There are certainly enough other things to keep me occupied.

At this point it would be very easy to put the thing down, forget about it for a few years. Afterall, I will most likely have to pay to publish the book. So why not forget about it for ten years or so. Wouldn’t that be a treat? What would I think of it then? I would probably have to start from scratch. So I must dig down even deeper to stay motivated to finish the work if this thing is going to see the possibility of an audience of more than one.

But the break hasn’t been all negative. I’ve been thinking of ways to better explain what is going on in the book. In hindsight, I think I left too much up to the reader. Left them to fill in TOO many holes. As a consequence I have made plenty of mental notes (but how many have I already forgotten?). Within a week I need to get back to the editing. I have to finish the hand corrections so I can make the digital changes to print a clean copy for my wife to read before she heads back to work in a few months. That edit I feel will be critical to the success of the book.

Onto page 130 now. Less than 60 to go. Some quick math says that I’m 2/3 through this edit. That’s good news for the end of the edit.

I’m beginning to question how much of the plot makes sense. How much will it translate to the reader? I think I need to go back to the beginning and put some more into the front end so the decisions the characters make towards the end read right.

It is interesting to note how differently the characters behave in these later edits than they did when the first ideas were being put together. Now there is a much different dynamic between the two main characters.

Overall I’m still happy with the work, I’m just struggling to make everything flow for the reader as it flows for me. And this is where I could really use a professional editor. But, as I’ve said before, I’m not going to pay for one.

I wrote in the previous post about myspace.com.  You may be slightly confused reading the rest of this post, if you have not read the Myspace post.

While adding friends to my myspace account I have come across many authors, some, it seems, trying to do just what I am attempting.  Clearly, nothing I am doing is original, and thus not as likely to succeed.  If I was in the first group of people to use myspace as a marketing tool, I may have more success. But now there is so much there to overwhelm a person.

OR, if I was an established person, I could come onto myspace and promote myself with pretty good success.  If Stephen King wrote his newest book and choose to promote it exclusively on myspace, he would undoubatly sell a large number of books.

The site is a big enough venue that word can spread quickly.  But, if you’re like me, still hoping one day to rise up enough to be included in the masses of the also-rans, why would anyone talk about me or my project? My best hope is to enlist my myspace friends who know me in real life to distribute information to their friends - who would ideally be interested and send it on to their friends.

My other friends on myspace don’t know me in real life and would certainly be less compelled to read what I have to offer. I assume this because I do the same thing. I have quite a few author friends who send me notices of new projects. I’d like to check them out, but I rarely do (for a number of reasons). So how am I to convince near strangers to even take a look at a sample of the book? I’m not sure yet, but hope to have it figured out when this book starts to near a realized published state.