Joanne Anderton

Well, I just passed the half-way point in this revision and sure enough the middle is as big a muddle as I’d feared. Tonight, I sat down and worked out what wasn’t working and how I could fix it. Then I cut 9000 words, give or take a few.

But you know what, that’s ok. Because [...]

It’s only the very beginning of 2010 and already it’s a super-busy year. Apart from working myself silly with revisions (and a new book idea has popped up AND a short story… down ideas! Sit! Stay!) we spent the weekend up in the Hunter Valley for my younger brother’s wedding. So yeah, it’s been a [...]

I need to remember that I can’t fix everything in this book in one go, and that I won’t even get a clear picture of the overall structure until I read the whole thing! Got to stop pulling my hair out over everything, calm down, and take it one step at a time.

Much to be [...]

So, after a vigorous internal debate I did not rearrange the structure of the beginning quite as drastically as I first thought. No matter what I tried the new structure just threw up a whole set of problems of its own. So instead, I tried to work out what was so wrong with it, why [...]

If this novel draft is a house, then this revision is the kind of renovation where the only thing that stays the same are the numbers out the front.

Eeek, I know, analogy torture.

I’ve come to the weighty decision that the structure of the entire beginning is wrong. Time to cut, rearrange, paste then smooth over [...]