{"id":165,"date":"2019-10-23T20:57:45","date_gmt":"2019-10-23T20:57:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/miketorr.com\/writer\/?p=165"},"modified":"2019-10-23T20:57:45","modified_gmt":"2019-10-23T20:57:45","slug":"in-the-thick-of-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/miketorr.com\/writer\/2019\/10\/23\/in-the-thick-of-it\/","title":{"rendered":"In the Thick of it"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Goodness me, it\u2019s been the best part of two months since my last post. In my defence, I did spend a little of the intervening time baking cookies.<\/p>\n

I mentioned, last time, that I’d booked myself onto a hectic editing schedule. This is now more than half done, and I\u2019m mentally exhausted and buzzing with creative energy at the same time. Editing is a wonderful thing (I\u2019m referring to structural, or developmental, editing). After I wrote my first novel, I was well aware that nothing got published without being edited, and yet I was a little scared of it. I didn\u2019t really understand how to begin. Those days are behind me, and it\u2019s now clear, as many have said, that writing happens in the edit. I\u2019ve also found that I unexpectedly enjoy the process. I\u2019m in the middle of writing a series of blog posts about the similarities between writing and other creative pursuits \u2013 and editing is something I\u2019m focussing on quite a lot. The biggest surprise of all was the moment when I realised how similar it was to software development (which has been my day job now for thirty years).<\/p>\n

In other news, I never took the online climate science course I\u2019d booked in September. I\u2019m gutted about that. Unfortunately, too much other stuff was happening around that time. I have to put my family, health and career first, and after making time to write, there really wasn\u2019t a lot left over. We all need a margin in which to absorb unexpected load, and I hadn\u2019t left one. Since I live in England, I\u2019m also currently coming to terms with the little matter of my country and its people being torn apart by modern politics. I don\u2019t intend to go into all of the details of that on this blog, but it\u2019s relevant here because that kind of thing takes its toll on one\u2019s emotional state.<\/p>\n

Anyway, things are going pretty well with the edits, although a couple of my chapters are rather quirky and require an unusually abstract approach, so there\u2019s a lot of angsty hand-wringing going on. By the middle of November I should have finished discussing things with my editor, and certainly by December I hope to have processed and applied all the edits, to produce final drafts of The Nine (as I like fondly to refer to them \u2013 recalling Lord of the Rings, of course). At that point, I\u2019ll be tackling the rather interesting challenge of the Tenth Chapter, which is the point where the stories converge and the real story begins. That will be tough, and what follows will be even tougher because I\u2019m not yet sure what will happen! Yes, that\u2019s right: not only am I editing a book before it\u2019s finished, I\u2019m editing it before it\u2019s fully drafted, or even fully outlined. There are, as I have explained previously, reasons for this. This whole thing is bonkers. God, I hope it\u2019s worth it.<\/p>\n

Anyway, I\u2019ll be back soon with my thoughts about the isomorphisms \u2013 I mean the similarities (sorry, once a maths grad\u2026) between working in different creative media. I look forward to finishing those thoughts, although my current brain state will give them stiff competition. Be kind to each other, lovely people.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\nStill surfing that wave!\n<\/div>\n
Continue reading “In the Thick of it”<\/span>…<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":166,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_FSMCFIC_featured_image_caption":"","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_nocaption":"","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_hide":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5,10],"tags":[11,7],"class_list":["post-165","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-journal","category-writing","tag-editing","tag-writing","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/miketorr.com\/writer\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/Cookies.jpg?fit=1200%2C794&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/miketorr.com\/writer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/miketorr.com\/writer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/miketorr.com\/writer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miketorr.com\/writer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miketorr.com\/writer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=165"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/miketorr.com\/writer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":169,"href":"https:\/\/miketorr.com\/writer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165\/revisions\/169"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miketorr.com\/writer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/166"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/miketorr.com\/writer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miketorr.com\/writer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/miketorr.com\/writer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}