Log 2014 23rd Mar: Bad Dog Act 1 Draft

What my partner thinks my hands look  like when I'm typing; from Ghost in the Shell.

Well what a week it has been for me, and all good.  First I've come out of the other end of a very bad chest cough, and I no longer feel like dying.  I also had a review by my GP, and my latest blood test shows that my inflammatory markers are stable, which means that my rheumatoid arthritis is stable; after six months of being off the methotrexate, which caused a decrease of my kidney function during my four years of treatment, this news is to put it mildly, a bit of a relief.  While my kidney function has stabilised, it will need to be monitored every six months for the foreseeable future.

Still mustn't grumble, things could after all be worse.

As I discussed last week, I started restructuring my novel based on two of my Beta readers feedback.  This week I got back the feedback from my third Beta Reader that really kicked the ball out of the field.  Using this, and the first two readers notes I was able to correct my second draft of the novel.  This has been an illuminating experience, which has highlighted my fundamental weaknesses as a writer; a poor educational record, and a bad upbringing.

Therefore I've been addressing the deficits in my writing craft, and have had a couple of minor Oh Doh moments along the way.  Hopefully, I will be able to translate these moments into meaningful skill improvements, and thereby bootstrap the quality of my writing.  We shall see, and I'm now really looking forward to the workshop critique that I have booked for next month.  Reflecting on how word count is not always a metric for measuring progress, this week I managed to write 2,617, ending up with a draft that was only 1,427 words longer than the one I started with; and trust me when I say I had negative running totals on some days that I wrote.

The biggest achievement was getting the 16,441 words of act 1 finished, which was a bit of a nightmare; I began with about sixteen thousand words, intending to edit down to fifteen thousand, but ended up with nearly nineteen thousand words by Friday night.  Saturday morning I woke up at six with an idea on how to edit Act 1.  I then went back to sleep, but had to get up at seven thirty, and I wrote throughout out the day, finishing around seven in the evening.  In addition, I managed to knock the remaining acts into submission too.  So a good days writing, and I feel quite euphoric, which is not a feeling I've had much acquaintance with over the last few weeks.  It feels good to be feeling good again, after feeling down in the dumps for so long.

So no chats about what I've been watching now, but I'll probably do a couple of extra posts later, over the course of the week, if I have time.  Thank you all for reading this, and take good care of yourselves, because if you don't have your health then you don't have anything.