Chris Copley - Writer

I'm rewriting Rewind - or redrafting, revising, whatever. I don't know the correct terminology yet and I've no idea if I'm even doing it the right way, but it's working, so in the absence of any better methods, I'm going to stick to what I'm doing. I've got it open in Scrivener and have moved the entire first draft into the notes folder. I have the editing window split, with the first draft of the scene on the right and the new draft on the left. I'm retyping everything. I was concerned about the word count for Rewind, as it topped out at between 40-50,000 words. I can't honestly remember the final count. I've read conflicting views about whether that would constitute a novel, with some websites saying that a novel needs to be at least 50,000 words, in which case Rewind would have been a novella. Other sites, however, say that 40,000 words is the baseline for a novel.  Either way, the rewrite is increasing the word count by around twenty-five...

The Cloud Collective is finished, topping out at 51,739 words, including THE END. There's still a long way to do. It needs editing and that's going to be a lot of work, but now I know where the story is going, how it's going to end and what I expect from the characters, I can work on the rest. It feels a lot like a car body repair using filler. The first fill is uneven, just to start shaping the final curve or panel, then after sanding more filler is applied. Sand, fill, sand again, until the right shape is achieved. If it's done properly then once the panel is sprayed, all you can see is a smooth, level surface and nobody would even know about the layers it took to achieve that. This is what I'm hoping for; an end result that is seamless, smooth and unbroken, where the reader doesn't see the joins or the layers.

I’ve just finished reading a book that was extremely well-written but painfully predictable. I’m not going to name the book or the author, partly out of respect and partly because I don’t want her ripping my work to pieces at a later date. It opened with the discovery of a body, female, of course, abducted, raped, strangled and left in a signature pose by the killer. After a second identical murder victim has a common contact in her phone book, a man is arrested on circumstantial evidence. You’ve probably already guessed that while this man is in custody another victim is found. If I go on to tell you that the investigating officer has a daughter of the same age and at the same college as the other victims, I think you know what else is coming. The investigating officer is taken off the case but, of course, insists on pursuing every lead. Her daughter stops answering her phone at the exact moment the detective realises that one of her daughter's friends is the killer and she ...

It's day eight of NaNoWriMo 2022 and my project currently stands at 24,600, with 3,000 of those words having been added today. I had the pleasure of venturing out to McDonald's this morning, the first time I've been able to go out in two weeks because of the meds I've been taking. The laptop had to come with me, of course, because otherwise I would have wasted the time scrolling through BBC News or social media. After having some doubts about my project, specifically worrying that I will run out of story before I hit 50,000 words, I tweeted for help and the wonderful writing community on Twitter came up with some excellent suggestions. One of those was to look at my character development. I have to admit that is an area I haven't spent nearly as much time on as I should have, being eager to get stuck into the writing. I've fully profiled Billy Butler now, and will take some more time to do the same for the other five main characters. The other suggestion was to ...

I've updated my NaNoWriMo page with my real name and two of my other projects. Rewind, which has been drafted and needs editing, and The Last Angel, which has been in preparation for more years than I'd like to think. Doing this means that I'm officially committing to working on them. NaNoWriMo is a November project, so December is set aside for editing Rewind and then January for carrying out some more prep on The Last Angel. I have dozens of other ideas floating around in my head too, the most cohesive of which is Another World - the one that may or may not have the time-travelling motorcycle shop owner in it. It feels good to be able to put some specific dates on things. I'm not expecting to finish editing Rewind during December or reach the stage when I'm ready to start drafting Angel by 1st February, but now they have start dates, I can more confidently think of them as works in progress rather than just ideas.

I spent October planning my November project. I had the ending, then the beginning, then filled in all the bits in between until the story was complete, both in my mind and in my timeline. Then one of my characters asked a question I hadn't been expecting and the story has jumped the tracks. Instead of hunkering down in their house, preparing to defend themselves, my family is in a hotel, five hours away from the antagonists. With a tight deadline (for the antagonists, not for the story) I now have to find a way to get the family back into town and into the factory unit where the final showdown will take place. This has left me wondering about outlining. Without the outline I don't think I would have come this far in my story, but if my character hadn't asked that question, which once asked seemed blindingly obvious, I'd have followed the outline to conclusion and a reader would have asked it instead. That might have left a glaring and embarrassing plot hole. Does this ...