Joanne Anderton

How do writers deal with depressing news? I dunno about other writers but this one:

Drinks of a lot of wine
Takes a few days off to hang out with friends and husband (people well skilled in the art of ‘making you feel better’)
Makes two delicious varieties of home made pesto, from the forest of home grown [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Is it really worth analyzing the writing of this novel draft any more than I’ve already done? I have angsted like an angsty thing about it. Hell, it even led to the creation of a ‘Writerly Angst’ category.

So, you know what? No more angst.

Instead, one of the positive things this draft taught me — well, [...]