Authors Electric

When I posted in February, I'd just sent my MS off to my editor. She came back to me in March with only six pages of notes (when I used her for my debut it was fifteen pages so I consider this progress)! Overall she was happy and we clarified a few issues over a phone call. I started to work on the corrections but as I was working through, I noticed a few odd mistakes that I thought I'd corrected. If you remember from last time, I got Word to read out my MS so I heard the changes I needed to make. Had I forgotten to change them? I then got to a bit where I knew I'd added more detail. It wasn't there. Then it dawned on me. I hadn't sent my final draft. In a hurry to get everything done before going away, I'd send an earlier revision. For a day, it was the end of the world. Complete meltdown. Next day, a friend told me about the Compare option on Word. I tried it but there were too many changes for me to look at. I did my best to remember which passages I'd ch...

Following a temporary planning meltdown towards the end of last year, New Year’s Eve found me hard at work on my 2023 writing plan. I’ve long given up making New Year resolutions, but if you are looking for one that sometimes works, you could do worse than use an old one of mine: ‘I won't say I can’t be bothered’. I think it’s the specificity of this that makes it work, as it’s much easier to stick to not saying it than it is not to feel it. So instead of resolutions I always make a writing plan for the year. Last year’s was oddly regimented, with a page of notes about what kind of things I would write, and then a second page listing the months of the year with a sentence or two about the project I’d be working on during each month. It was this second page that turned out to be fatally flawed, perhaps not surprisingly, so this year I’m starting with just the general outline, now with only vague ranges of months pencilled in against the writing tasks, which in any case are more or...