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 [...]

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, [...]

Each new novel I write teaches me things. While this one is still too far from finished to know the full extent of these lessons, I have learned one thing already. I need to plan Writing and Real Life around each other better than I do. For example, it’s probably not a good idea to [...]