ieva melgalve » edits

the week of writing in the snow

ieva — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 17:36:39 +0000

Last week was one of the busiest, most stressful weeks ever. I still managed to get my writing done and accumulated 3K words for Virgin, as well as got some editing done (acceptable amount).
Last week was also when we launched a social project in Latvia, one that proclamates 2010 as The Reading Year. At some point it became profoundly important for me personally.
Other than that, I seem to be running out of words badly. I somehow manage to use them up in writing and at some point, there’s little left. I console myself thinking that at least they went to the right places.

And we’re still snowed in. This is the deepest, most beautiful winter I remember; and each morning, the frozen-and snowed over Daugava river greets me with its whiteness that approaches nothingness. Waking up and seeing whitescapes all over is so freeing, so true. So good after all the nightmares I have of late.

Are you writing too? How did it go?

moving on

ieva — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 09:20:14 +0000

So, it seems that I have a new “not-quite-nosebleed” wordcount for a day, namely, 1K words on a working day. (Given that I’m not miserably stuck, that I’m not using my writing time to work on a short story, and I’m distracted some other way… but then, I can grab 20 minutes or so in the evening to fill in.) Weekends are quite unpredictable, but I think that mostly I can find some time to fill in for days when I didn’t work in the weekdays.
Yesterday, I did 1200 words and some planning. For a moment, I was scared that I’ll end up without a good ending, but it turned out that I had been doing the planning wrong. The winning approach was a mindmap with two main problems of the story that needed resolution, and fill in things that I knew I had to have. Also, I allowed my loverboy to make a right decision instead of going his usual blunder-correct way. I believe he’s quite happy with me now.
I still have to figure out a new short story to write for critters and read The Longest Night for final edits. So this will be a busy week even with my improved speed.

rejection kicks ass too

ieva — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 07:28:42 +0000

Well, of course, it doesn’t.
However, writing after rejection kicks ass because I’m having fun writing, even though I had all reasons to feel discouraged. Which means two things:
a) I am really writing because I like writing (which is cool, as it is a reason less dependent on others),
b) I am getting used to rejections (which is cool too, because that’s part of the job, especially for me, I guess).
So I wrote 500 words on the tram today, and it seems that lately I’ve been getting ~500 words on the tram all the time. Basically, I can write 2500 words a week while not overexerting myself and taking the weekends off. That means full-blown novel (80 K) in seven months, thus a novel a year (considering edits), and oh yes, I’m good at maths. The funny aspect being that if I ever get a driver’s licence and go to work by car, all this carefully laid-out plan to write, hmmm, 40 novels until I get retired, will go down the drain.
Also, I decided to pretty much wing the ending. I now have ~20 K to write, and I think I can’t mess up big time. It’s logical to plan in the beginning when a small mistake can create an avalanche effect, but now I think I cannot mess up the whole novel, I can mess up the ending only.
As far as I know myself, I’m more likely to mess up the ending by writing cautiously and reminding myself not to go over the board. That’s something that would be very hard to fix because editing is certainly not the time when I go wild and write something crazy and mindsweeping. So I’m writing crazy NOW and tune it down, if necessary, in edits.
That frees up a lot of time for NaNoWriMo planning as well as my usual doodling around.