Arting Harder at the Pen Monkey Toiling Pit (Celebrate Them Pages Pt III)

[The Deposed King]

Well just make sure to save your work so that when you cycle down you can't delete everything because it all 'sucks'.  Maybe give copies to a friend who doesn't even need to read it just hold it.

Other than that I don't think it really matters why a person writes so long as they enjoy doing it.  If you enjoy what you're doing, then people will pick up on that and they'll enjoy it too.

I've often if I ever did a writing workshop for new would-be writers what I would say.  I've thought perhaps open the class with a question.

"Do you think you could write a book so bad that no one would ever read it?"  "A full length book?"

Cause most people never do.  And I guarantee that if you (the general student you) wrote a full length book you could fix it up and make it sing and somebody would buy it.  Studies have shown that 2% of people will buy just about anything.



The Deposed King

[pcpoet]

I save every thing now even the stuff I hate. you never no when you have gold. years ago I did poetry. I destroyed everything that I wrote when I was doing poetry because when I came down from my manic high all it did was remind me how sick I was when I have a mania. I have a few examples that somehow managed to miss the great purge and it sickens me because one or two pieces are truly brilliant.

[Snowleopard]

Just a little note of reality here - keep copies of everything you've saved in a least one
off site place.  Be it someplace like Carbomite or a flashdrive at Aunt Berthas but
do keep one somewhere.  This way - heaven forfend - something happens to your computer or,
even worse, your place - you've got those copies to fall back on.
Not trying to be a downer just passing on some advice given to me years ago.

[The Deposed King]

I hear you Snowleopard, I almost lost an entire manuscript. Well 80%, because my computer crashed and I hadn't backed it up since like 20k words.

I'd just plain forgotten and when I tried to go and get some of the files I'd saved on yahoo that were like 60% through the book, the mail program kept having an error, said it was a bad file type for them.  I was just about at wits end until I managed to get my hard drive hooked up to something other than my dead lap top and retrieved the file.

The relief was palpable.  So yeah it doesn't matter why, just save your work!  I was in a funk for days until the IT guys finally managed to get me back that file.  Months worth of work, yeeee





The Deposed King

[pcpoet]

years ago when I was going to the university. I was new to owning a computer and my computer windows program  failed only two months after getting a computer. I had ten page paper on it which was most my grade for my class. I paid 100 dollars just to get someone to either retrieve the paper or to fix the computer. they fixed the computer. I had a setting wrong on the computer that made it so I could not access other programs using windows. I think it took the person all of tem minutes to fix the problem. I felt ripped off by the company at the time. but since then it has been back up everything digatal

[Snowleopard]

I heard a tale of someone who was saving his work to a - wait for it - rewritable CD-R - despite warnings not to -
so guess what happened?  Yup, rewrote over most of his novel and had to rewrite most of it.

[Farmerbob1]

With the name of the thread being a bit surreal, I was trying to figure out what this thread was for.  After reading through the first few pages, I realized I was being a dunce.  Since I do blog fiction, everything I write immediately gets published the day I write it - this also creates a backup on the blog.

Now that I know what this thread is about, I love the name 

[The Deposed King]

Its a great thread but its been pretty slow lately.  We used to have a lot of people posting their new word counts but its faded away a bit.  And with me on a 'just completed a book' cool down period, there's not a whole lot of action.


Good to see you here Farmerbob1



The Deposed King

[pcpoet]

my word count is 10,218 as of this post and counting 

[trboturtle]

Its a great thread but its been pretty slow lately.  We used to have a lot of people posting their new word counts but its faded away a bit.  And with me on a 'just completed a book' cool down period, there's not a whole lot of action.


Good to see you here Farmerbob1



The Deposed King

In my case, I had to go back and rip apart several chapters because I was making things too complex when they didn't need to be. Back on track now, and the WC for African Firestorm is now 59.1K.....

Craig

[The Deposed King]

Great to hear some new word count action guys!



The Deposed King

[Farmerbob1]

Knights of Broken Swords is at 15,355 words including a little bit of header info for each of three chapters.

[pcpoet]

My books title at least at this point is periwinkle. it is the story of a sprite (fairy) who gets trapped in a jen bottle  for four hundred years and escapes entrapment in the1960's..   I want to do a whole series of books dealing with the the historical and cultural events of the 1960-1970 and my character periwinkle.

[Farmerbob1]

Knights of Broken Swords is at 27,802 words including a little bit of header info for each of the five chapters.

[Paynesgrey]

"Valorous Daughter" (novella) is in the hands of the very model of modern capable copy-editor.  I've got another short story finished... purposefully ignoring it for a week or so while I revise some other shorts before sening them back to the slush pits.  And the ongoing edits of "A Kiss For Damocles," which will hopefully be ready to go to aforementioned copy-editor once he wraps up his work on Valorous Daughter.  Been a productive couple of months.

The big news is that I took everything I've learned over the past year... reader feedback, betas, personal rejections, and a couple story critiques from P.N. Elrod and looked at the novella I self-published a year ago.  Learned a lot since then, so I revised that sucker, fleshing some things out more, trimming redundant expositional overexplaining that was excessive.  Also added a historical timeline and rather exhaustive glossary of terms.  Just goes to show that when you think a piece is "perfect," putting some time and words between you and that piece will invariably point out some room for improvement.

http://www.amazon.com/Ravati-Aziz-Terror-Twelvety-Town-ebook/dp/B00GZEDSIQ/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1420414604&sr=8-1&keywords=ravati+aziz