A. P. Howell

Murdering darlings

2019-07-13T14:51:36Z

It is a bloodbath, and I feel very good about it.

In absolute terms it is a very small amount of blood, as this is a short story. But proportionally speaking, it is a bloodbath.

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I'm sure there's a word for this in German

2019-05-22T14:06:05Z

The feeling when you're going through your list of style issues to normalize, and you realize you've already made decisions about most of the issues and implemented the bulk of them organically.

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Plink, plink, plink

2019-05-10T15:12:32Z

Changing the first name of a character who never uses it because he doesn't like it, so it's no longer an inadvertently googlable company name. (He doesn't like the new name, either.) Attempting to change the name of another character, who is minor but appears in chapter one, so it can't be put off.

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Okay, that wasn't so bad

2019-05-05T17:58:22Z

I did this read through over the course of a few days, generated a manageable punch list, and don't want to delete all evidence of the thing. So that's a win.

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Shifting text files

2019-03-29T14:23:55Z

I've been moving text files into folders in Scrivener. I will usually do one scene per text file (except when I don't; but for the most part, they're sensibly discrete units). I also finally boiled a running notes-and-to-do Word doc into a second, much shorter Word doc. I am looking forward to April, when I will be Doing Something Else. I would probably have taken a break already, but there wasn't anything I definitely wanted to do and at this point I'm almost at the end of the month, so I'll just keep rolling a couple short fiction ideas around in my head a bit longer, and maybe succeed in making a few more tweaks before I compile my latest draft and let it sit, ignored, on the hard drive for a while.

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Words feel good

2019-03-18T18:23:34Z

I wrote north of 500 words today, for the first time in a while. They're replacement words, but in this case part of a major chunk of chapter (not tweaks measured in words/sentences/paragraphs, which is most of what I've been doing). It felt very nice and further underscores the degree to which new words feel much less of a slog than editing.

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Ugh, at least there's a milestone

2019-03-10T21:20:44Z

I finished the main body of production and line editing. I still have notes on things to go back and do, but they're pretty straightforward (she says optimistically; I was supposed to be done with this a month ago). This is my penultimate read-through before making the first tentative steps on sending this particular thing out. I'll probably wait until Mayish to do that. I do think my decision to build in time to set things aside has been good (at least for the longer stuff I've been working on; it mostly means the unrelated short stories have been languishing). It's prevented me from being caught up in neverending edits and ongoing rounds of tiny changes.

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Writing again...eventually

2019-03-07T18:05:15Z

Three days ago, it dawned on me that I could solve a problem by having a character make a more straightforward decision. I felt rather silly for not having realized that a year ago. (Or earlier in the rewrite process because, to be fair to myself, I have been taking my approach of write/set aside/add and revise/etc. seriously, so before this editing pass July was the last time I'd touched the file or considered the story in any detail.) Instead of feeling like I'd given myself more work, I was very happy at the prospect of trashing and rewriting an existing chapter. Logistics dictate that I haven't gotten the chance to do it yet, but now it's like the cookie at the end of this editing pass, which is still otherwise a slog.

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Mood swing

2019-02-27T16:21:18Z

Yesterday, I figured out a couple worldbuilding things. I was tired and in a generally lousy mood, so my reaction was "Crap, more work." That was, in fact, when I realized I was not merely tired but also in a lousy mood. Today I've been more pleased with myself for figuring out those little tweaks, and I have done some of the work to implement them. It's still an absolute slog.

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First line line edits

2019-01-29T15:57:43Z

I replaced two words with five words and feel like I have accomplished so much.

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