Raven's View

The following was written initially for the January issue of the newsletter for a group I belong to. There wasn't room for me in this issue, so rather than wait another 6 weeks I thought I'd post my article here anyways, and resubmit later.  I've added to the original article of course, it's easy to add words if you've the space. The challenge can be to say the same thing in less words, whether to fit an editor's guideline or out of pity for your audience.

The article summarizes my November writing experience for NaNoWriMo, as well as some of the subsequent research and editing process. I was advised to wait a month before editing my novel, to be able to approach it from a fresh perspective, so in the meantime I've been reading up on the art/craft of writing, and of editing.

Wow - there's almost an endless supply of articles and blogs and books and opinions out there on this - I think if I'd had the time to look into this earlier I would have never started to write, blocked either by intimidation or by the search for yet more information. It's a good argument for "ignorance is bliss" and for following the 80/20 rule in life, that sometimes close enough is a better choice than 100% perfect. I did find many interesting posts, including one talking about writers vs authors, prompted by news that scatterbrained Snookie (from MTV's Jersey Shore) had published a book. The blog clarified that writers write, authors have been published. Snookie is the latter, but not the former, as her book was ghost written. I won't list all the other articles I've found, some are referenced in my Twitter feed, on the right side of this page. Which also gets copied to my Facebook automatically. Ah - what would we do without all this technology, and for that matter what would I do without all these things filling my day? Well, I might write more, as that's part of my New Year's resolutions - to refocus. I've dropped a band, will pick less (and cheaper) cable choices for TV (or maybe rabbit ears?), will spend less time trying to change things/people/groups that I can't change, or that don't want to change. I'll do another post on resolutions and/or a bucket list later. Here's my NaNoWriMo article: