IF you’ve been following updates on my Work-in-Progress (WiP) page, you’ll know that I’ve been working on a short non-fiction book about my writing process while I’m (1) waiting on markups for The Artemis Device from my copy editor, and (2) waiting on responses from agents for the query letters I sent out for Smoke & Mirrors. The first could appear at any time; the second I don’t expect for at least another couple of weeks.
So in the interim, and before I get properly to work on the SF novel I’ve been thinking about, I decided to do something I’ve been wanting to do for a while—document my writing process. And thanks to the writing workshop I’ve been going to the last few weeks, I also decided to write it up in a form that I can self-publish, in the hope that maybe I can do something that will help other aspiring writers.
By short I mean that the main body will probably end up being around thirty pages; my writing process, boiled down to just the essentials. The stuff I wish I’d known when I was just getting started, in a form that someone can read in an hour or less and keep handy as a reference after.
I started with a series of about half a dozen blog posts I wrote here a while ago; I’ve cleaned those up, expanded on them with some better examples and some additional material, and changed the order of things around a little bit to make it a bit more logical.
It’s just about done; the main text is complete, I think—I’ll be checking it through again to see if I missed anything. It needs a few things yet: a cover page, a proper title, and some front and back matter. And I have to re-read the Smashwords guides to remind myself how to format it all up. But I expect to have that all done in a couple more weeks at the most, and then it’ll be out (and of course I’ll announce it here when that happens).
On that note, time for coffee and a read of that Smashwords formatting guide. Until next time . . .
(p.s. I’ve decided to cut down on the political comment a bit. Not completely; if and when I have something I want to say regarding “president” Loco Pandejo and the Keystone Kabinet, I will. But since I managed to get myself back on the writing horse the last few weeks, I want to focus more on that. I seriously considered unfollowing all the politically-related Twitter accounts that I’ve added over the last six months, but I still feel the need to stay up with what’s going on so I guess I’m stuck with those until the Jedi arrest Trump and the rest of the traitors and pack them off to prison.)
Pete Ford 