Category Archives: urban fantasy

I’m struggling to keep in edit mode right now with Arcadian. I’m doing a bit of spit-and-polish on the parts I’ve changed and extended or added in this draft, but I’m beginning to get lazy, so I’m taking a quick break to write a post and tell you what I’ve been up to.

In writing, I’ve obviously been spending too much time on Arcadian. It’s five weeks now since I began this draft and I have recognised that I’m starting to get lazy and that usually signals that I need to do something else and regroup or I just won’t do a good enough job. I’ve planned out everything that is left to do on this draft and it’s around 2 weeks work minimum. If I go with a complete read through again, it could be a lot longer. I think I just need to do the changed or added stuff for now and save the complete read through for when it’s rested for a while.

I’m going to Japan again for 3 weeks in November, which means I can’t participate in NaNoWriMo again this year either. I participated a few years back and it was a lot of fun, and I wrote the first draft of Cabin Fever for it. I would like to do it again sometime. Maybe next year.

My Japan trip is going to hopefully provide me some time to read through Arcadian in paperback form again to find errors and fix it up for the final polish. I’ll probably go to the effort of taking it with me, and then I’ll end up just watching movies on the flights instead! You’d think that with 12 hours on a plane, I’d be up for reading, but quite often they have good movies. I have a few long train journeys while I’m in Japan with the husband, so maybe I could squeeze in some time for editing then too. Again, I’ll probably just stare out of the window instead. Hehe. It’s a holiday after all.

I’ve been searching for literary agents that deal with paranormal romance over the past year, on and off, and I have to admit that it’s rather difficult to find them in the UK. They don’t really list paranormal romance as an interest over here. It’s difficult enough to find ones that want romance. I have found some good ones in New York who accept emails, so I’ll be trying those as well as UK ones that I manage to dig up from somewhere. Unfortunately, Arcadian is longer than the maximum word count that a lot of publishing houses accept for a submission. It’s not as though I can cut it down either. It’s 155,000 words because that’s the length it needs to be as it has a lot of plot and characters. It’s not as though I’m being long-winded in any of it. All of the readers who received the second draft (six of them) have come back saying the pace was great, the plot was great, and they even wanted stuff added to it! There’s a few publishing houses on my list who don’t give you a limit so I’ll send it to them and then agents too.

I started going to archery classes again on Sunday. It’s a ten week course and I really enjoyed the last one that I did, so I thought I would give it a go again and see if I’m serious enough to try for a club and do it every week, with my own equipment. I think I would like to. It is a lot of fun and, being very logic-minded, I’m quite good at it.

Well, I think that’s everything that I’ve been up to. I’ve managed to fritter away the hour journey into work on the train this morning writing blog posts and even my time before work in the office. I think that’s quite an impressive bit of procrastination, although I could just say that it was necessary work, and I did need a break from Arcadian.

Now I’ll spend probably spend lunch with work colleagues rather than continuing my editing work, and then on the train home, I’ll probably watch anime.

(note: I did spend lunch with some work colleagues, but it was a damn nice Oreo milkshake and chips!)

Well, my third draft of Arcadian was supposed to be more of a polish than anything, but on reading it through I got thinking about the characters, and parts of the storyline, and now it’s more of a third draft/revision/edit than a polish.

I recently sent out 6 copies to readers to get their opinions on the story. The story was only in second draft at the time, but the responses were extremely positive and the general consensus was that it could compete with other authors in the paranormal romance genre in print, and that the plot and characters were right, but parts needed more explanation or needed expanding on. The good thing was that those parts that needed more explanation or expanding with additional scenes were all ones that I had already written down to tackle.

The story was 129600 words at the end of the second draft. I’ve been spending time layering more description so people can more easily picture the scene/locations, and tackling some of the smaller issues/comments that I had written down to revise. I had 130 comments at the start of the third draft, cluttering my word document, but now I’m down to around 45. Most of the remaining ones are points to re-describe the characters to get them clearer in readers heads, or to add more emotion/extra scene/more oomph!

Even more recently, I gave a copy to a guy I work with as he was interested in reading it and giving his opinion, and also proofing it a little. It was good to get the opinion of someone who wasn’t a romance genre reader, to see if it would appeal to a wider audience too. He came back with places to expand on/explain more (the same places as the other readers), and actually said that it would make a really good movie. I always feel as though I write movies, and I have a lot of readers who come back to me saying that it the story they had read would be a good movie/TV series, and that they could see the scenes playing out in their mind. I always love to hear that from readers. It’s nice to know that you’ve got them so caught up that they’re right there in the moment with the characters.

Today I was reading over my editing books, mostly ones on emotion, characters and view point, and scene, and it struck me that I needed to change the start of the story quite dramatically. It had never quite sat right with me, and I think the way I want to rewrite it will make it a lot stronger. Of course, it’s more time added onto an already long editing schedule, but it’s worth it to get the story right. I’ve also plotted out the hero and heroines emotional arc a bit more so I can address some issues I have with them too. Those are going to be the tough bits to do. Adding in description and giving a little more information about certain things isn’t difficult, but changing a characters emotional arc and totally altering the beginning to make it stronger is going to be a toughie, mostly because I’ll have to check the rest of the story for references to those things and change it accordingly.

Well, enough waffle about the editing. I just wanted to let everyone know how it was going and what I was up to. Hopefully I will have finished this third draft and will be ready to do a polish on it in November when I have been to Japan for a much needed and well deserved holiday!

Happy reading, everyone!

F x

The self editing phase of my paranormal romance novel, codenamed Arcadian, is well underway now.

Last weekend I gave it a first read through on paper. It reads well and I enjoyed it, devoured it, couldn’t put the damn thing down (hubby was very understanding), but I spotted things that needed changing and words that I overused. I’ve spent the week having a good think about that read through and doing basic grammar and spelling checks, and putting together a running outline of the story. The more I think about it, the more I start to gain perspective and figure out what needs to change.

I don’t think anything needs to change with the plot but I might up the tension and flesh out the bad guy more. The characters are all pretty good at this stage. I have a few things to address with the hero and heroine, but that’s mostly repetition of feelings and thoughts rather than them as characters.

I have also found a few scenes that could be cut down to increase the pace and drop the word count.

All this means that I now have a list of stuff to work on in this second draft phase that is as long as my arm (excuse the cliche). I have allowed 5 weeks in my schedule, 4 remaining after this week, but I might give myself more time so I don’t feel pressured and can work on this one properly.

Today I tested how long it would take me to sit down and give the story a thorough going over, cutting out unnecessary words, phrasing things better, and looking out for repetition (as well as too many ‘-ing’ and ‘as’ sentences). I did it on one chapter and it took an hour and a quarter. I did a second chapter and again it took an hour and a quarter. There are 34 chapters in this story. That’s 42.5 hours to do this kind of edit. I only get 3 hours a day to work on the story (if I’m lucky, and if I don’t do any Japanese), which means that it’s going to take me roughly 15 days to edit the story this way once I’ve fixed up the things I’ve noted down to address. Phew! Three weeks solid work only inching forwards 2 chapters a day is going to be hard, but it will be worth it. I might have to break off and do other things sometimes just to keep sane 🙂

My trimming and hard work on these two chapters cut out 644 words though. If I cut out 300 words per chapter on average, it’s going to chop a much needed 10,200 words off this story. That will bring it close to 120,000. That would make me very happy indeed! I think the story would benefit from having the pace increased to that extent.

It will be hard work though. Time to adjust my writing schedule again! I might just have to free up my time until end of May. Thankfully I’m in a position where I can focus on editing this and getting a good second draft done.

Well, now I need to crack on with finishing the new look for my website. Lots of work still to do on that. I can’t wait to get phase one of it done so I can get it off my mind for a month or so.

My archery class has finished too so I don’t have that to keep my stress-free now. I’m trying to join a local club but no word yet. I really want to continue with archery. I was doing quite well at it considering that we only had 9 hours in total lesson time.

It’s my birthday on Tuesday. I have Monday and Tuesday off, but will likely work most of the time I have off work. I want to finish this website and get moving on the edits for Arcadian.

I’ll keep everyone posted on my progress!

F