It’s taken me eight years to get to the end of my Big Novel but it’s done!  At last!  Bring on the champagne!
 
I really finished it over a week ago, wrapping up the last of the Killer Edit, and producing a synopsis and cover letter while it was still fresh in my mind.  But yesterday I did the final bit of formatting.  When I write (directly onto the screen), I don’t use indents as I find them hugely off-putting, and I write in block paragraphs i.e. with a line space between each paragraph.  I’ve always written like this as it keeps things neat and tidy inside my head and on the page, but obviously the final product can’t look like this.  You certainly can’t self-publish a manuscript looking like that and no agent or publisher is going to look at something so unformatted.  So my final act was to add the indents, then go through the entire novel getting rid of those line spaces between each paragraph.  And also getting rid of the indents at the beginning of each chapter AND the chapter number (indenting afterwards throws off the centring). 
 
I know lots of people write with tabs.  This makes me shudder from head to tail!  The horror!  But there you are, we all have our different foibles.  No doubt anyone watching me write in block paragraphs is filled with the same horror!  I just don’t get why anyone would want to use tabs – if you’re self-publishing, you absolutely can’t use that manuscript and have to get rid of every single tab!  Anyway, this is utterly beside the point.  Once I’d done my formatting, I was done.  I felt it was finished.  The moment of great finality had come.  My novel had reached the end.
 
I first came up with the idea about eight years ago but didn’t start working on notes until a year or more later.  I only know I wrote the first words on the first page in February 2015 because I blogged it on my website.  The first draft was the battle from hell and took over two years.  When I say “first draft,” I really mean countless drafts.  The restarts, the rewrites, the rethinks, the restructuring.  The replotting.  The gigantic plot holes I had to fill and refill.  The rock hard shapeless stone I had to hammer and hammer and chisel and hammer some more to try and find the angel within.  It was a nightmare.
 
When that “first” draft was done, I abandoned it.  I changed my writing style and began a series of lightweight novels that weren’t allowed to go over 80K words.  I wrote short stories.  Novellas.  Flash fic.  Anything SHORT!  Well, shorter than 180K words, which is what it ended up as – it really was gigantic!  The novel also underwent several title changes.  The heroine had her name changed at least seven times.  Even her hair colour changed.  Huge chunks of world-building never made it into the novel, or if they did, were cut out again.  A huge amount of research was never used.  I can’t tell you how BIG this novel was, how MUCH work I put into it.  And what did I end up with?  A great big rock-solid heavy chunky faux-fantasy style disaster.  I ended up HATING the thing.
 
At the start of 2019 (before the pandemic really took hold), I did a massive edit, called the Red Edit.  I tore out 20K words.  I hacked and hacked and hacked.  And then I forgot I did all this and went off to have a writer’s crisis while the world locked down.  It was only when I needed a huge challenge to get me out of my deep funk that I faced the Killer Edit.  In this, what would have to be the final edit, I began to strip the novel back.  I simplified it as much as I could.  I thought I’d be able to rewrite the novel in a whole new style but honestly, I think that might have killed me right off.  I just had to the best damn editing job I’ve ever done.  I even did things like search over-used words such as THAT, AS IF, JUST and many others as it gave me another chance to rewrite badly structured sentences.  I got rid of every single instance of SO THAT, a phrase I used about a million times.  I mean, my God, truly, the writing in this novel was AWFUL.  I know what I was trying to do, though:  I know the mood I was trying to create.  But it just made a great big lumpy muddy mess instead of a dreamy gothic concoction.  My romantic ideals didn’t work.  I also, by the way, got rid of every single semi-colon.  Now, I know how to use semi-colons and I hadn’t used them incorrectly, but it was part of the simplification process.  Simple punctuation.  Simpler language.  Shorter sentences. 
 
There are chunks of this novel that still don’t work.  Yet there are parts that I am very proud of, that work for me, that are beautiful.  But the fucker still comes in at 160K words.  No agent in their right mind is going to look at it.  I have, over the years, both loved and hated this novel.  I’ve called it That Novel.  That Difficult Novel.  My magnum opus.  My prize winner. 
 
Now I’m just going to call it my finished novel.
 
Cheers.

Today I begin the brand new edit of a gigantic novel I have edited several times.  I’ve written about this novel here many, many times.  In another blog, I might even go and have a look at all those old posts to see what I’ve written!
 
But today I want to pat myself on the back – not because I’m starting a major piece of work, but because I’ve done more this year than I’d thought.  I’d quite forgotten that at the start of the year, I did a HUGE edit of this novel.  I chopped and chopped and pared down and whittled and rewrote bits and rethought Part 3 and gave it more life and really, really worked my arse off.  I even made notes for what was to be the last edit – not a proofreading-type edit, but an actual rewrite-type edit, in which I sit down and rewrite the whole novel (with the most recent draft open next to me) so that the words feel fresh and new on the page as they come out my fingers, so to speak.  I even made notes.  I made pages of notes.  I told myself what to do. 
 
I even gave it a name:  The Killer Edit.
 
And then I did what I needed to do:  I walked away from the novel so that when I came back to this killer edit, I’d feel fresh and raring to go.  Which, amazingly, is just how I feel!  This is a HUGE project.  I’ve been working on this novel, on and off, for bloody years.  After the year I’ve had with writing failures, I feel ready for this enormous challenge.  I want to be consumed by its problems and find ways of fixing it up!
 
What gets me is when I last worked on this novel:  it was March.  Yep.  March this year.  Just as Covid19 began to raise its head.  Just as this new word was added to our vocabulary.  I last modified the notes for my Killer Edit on the 6th of March.  It doesn’t seem that long ago.  But it also feels like a whole lifetime.

I finished a short story!  That doesn’t sound particularly amazing but considering the year I’ve had with writing, just to say I’ve FINISHED something feels like quite an achievement.
 
I never expected to write this particular short story.  The idea was quite unbelievably grim, describing the abuse of a preadolescent, all the way into her twenties.  This is not my usual style, nor was it something I was comfortable with.  The story’s saving grace was the beauty of the setting:  a wild, windy coastline, with an eerie quicksand beach.  There was a hint of magic – the heroine (or should I say victim?) was accused frequently of inverting her witchery (hence the abuse).  But otherwise the predominant colour of the story was grey.
 
I thought I might have come up with this idea very early this year, but I’ve just checked the creation date of the Word document in which I wrote up the notes I’d made, and I can’t believe it was last year in September.  When I finished the notes, I had a pretty good idea that I would never write it.  It was too grim.  No one would want to read it.  The fact that it had a fantastically happy ending wasn’t good enough – no one would ever get that far.  And, quite frankly, I didn’t want to write it either!  It was just too miserable!
 
But with my writing going so badly this year, suddenly I was in the mood to write something relentlessly grim.  Once the year had settled into its new routine – daughter back at uni, me back work, new lockdown on the horizon – I began The Winds of Witching.  I handwrote it as this gives me the greatest pleasure.  When you handwrite, you think you are creating the most wonderful piece of writing.  You are convinced that it’s going brilliantly, that jewels are dripping out the nib of your Bic.  Handwriting is great for your confidence!  I also noticed how calm I felt after a writing session.  Every rape scene took monumental confront but when I was done, I felt almost peaceful.  Anxiety slipped away.  I felt like myself again.
 
I remember mentioning this to my hairdresser who, in her great wisdom, said that the process of writing this grim tale was one of catharsis, given the difficult year we’ve just had.  Okay, she didn’t use those exact words but that’s what she meant!
 
When I came to type up the story, however, I realised how BAD it was.  Badly written, badly conceived, badly plotted.  But I gritted my teeth and did that thing that 95% of writing is about:  I edited.  I rewrote, changed stuff, put stuff in, took it out again, and by the time I got to the final draft, I stripped it down as much as I could.  When I was done, I was satisfied.  The satisfaction was enough that I could walk away from it and feel that it was, for the moment, finished. 
 
I suspect no one will ever read it.  So what was the point?  When I get the blues (and I’m calling them the blues when it should really be called black-hole-blackness), the one word that leaps into my mind a lot is “pointless.”  Everything feels pointless.  My life, my writing, the world, the whole universe (I tend to be dramatic in my thinking when I’m down).  I was determined that this short story WOULD have some point, even if it wasn’t to be read. 
 
It was, basically, an exercise in self-discipline.  Because if I’m going to get myself to the other end of this pandemic in one piece, I have to get back on the writing train.  I can’t just hang around the rail tracks.  With this project, I pushed myself hard.  I edited that damn piece of rubbish writing until it work, finally achieving something, only a very small thing, but better than nothing.  Confronting a difficult piece of work seems to be the way to go.
 
My next project is to edit – yet again! – that monstrous novel that I have, in hilarious moments, called my Prizewinning Novel.  I’m determined to attack the thing until it too works, until the words leap off the page so freshly the ink could still be wet. 
 
I may have to gird my loins for this.  

I’ve just spent the last hour trying to think of names for the two main characters in a new short story.  What a waste of time!  I wanted to make notes for the story;  instead I got stuck on what I was going to call the prince and princess. 
 
Why is it so difficult?  There was a time when names used to just jump into my head.  I never worried about whether a name was cool or not.  It was just a name.  A name that seemed almost preformed was Gomenzi, anti-hero of my novel “Transference.”  I was sure I had heard it somewhere before because it felt familiar.  It doesn’t, however, seem to exist.  It doesn’t come up at all if you Google it – aside from my novel “V. Gomenzi”.  These days I Google all names to make sure there isn’t some famous person with that name, although this is only true of names with surnames;  my characters often only have one name, particularly if they are gracing the pages of a sci-fi story.
 
Other names that have leapt into my head are: 
Angelica Zippoli
Alenka Koie
Claire Halward, with parents Nick and Karin
Dett (who had a number of variations such as Detter, Detteth, Detteria and Besredetth)
Sistia Scarpora
Yani
Domitian (okay, I stole that – but who would think to use it now!)
Ziann Rama
 
The list goes on! 
 
Recently, in the last year or so, my pool of imaginary names seems to have run dry.  The heroine in my short story “The Crystal Vision” had so many name changes that sitting here, right now, I can’t actually remember her name.  This is NOT a good sign.  All characters are a part of me, after all;  it’s like not being able to remember part of your own name.  I’ve just checked:  her name is Lightness.  Urgh.  No wonder I couldn’t remember it.  It isn’t really a proper name at all (her mirror-twin is called Darkling, which is even more ridiculous).
 
I’m currently doing an enormous edit on an enormous novel I “finished” three years ago.  The main character in this has not only had her hair colour change but also her name – at least seven times.  I really, really wanted to call her Igraine.  And this is where my problems start:  the names I love are invariably mythical or made-up and used in famous novels.  Igraine was King Arthur’s mum.  The name has pretty much never been used for anything else (unless you’re a trendy parent, the kind to saddle your kid with names like Merlin or Frodo or Galadriel).  I worked on it for an age and eventually came up with my own made-up name, Ilgria.  When the novel was done (at least, I thought it was done), I realised I didn’t like the name at all.  My daughter agreed, saying she thought it made the character sound old.  Being highly enamoured with Tolkien names, I pinched a word from Elvish and called her Elanen.  My daughter promptly mispronounced it.  I promptly discarded it.
 
The search went on.  After several more attempts, I came up with Alegria, which is basically just Allegra dressed up a bit.  When I started my Big Red Edit (which has currently turned into a bit of a rewrite), I realised it was horrible and had to wrack my brains all over again.  Finally, I hit on Elanor.  It sounds a bit like all the names I’ve been wanting to call her, so is ideal.  And it’s pretty!  But it’s also a very famous name from, yes, Tolkien, being both a flower and Sam Gamgee’s eldest daughter (she even has her own Wiki page).  I eventually settled on a variant of the spelling and my heroine is now called Ellinor.
 
But you know what?  I don’t like it. 
 
While that name-search hangs over my head, my new short story, which I dreamed up all of two weeks ago, has run aground on the same deserted beach.  It doesn’t help that she’s a princess and he’s a prince.  The ONLY name that seems to go with prince is Charming.  Yes.  Really.  Prince Charming.  I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
 

You don't.  I didn't, anyway, yet I am a ferocious editor of my own work and a brilliant proofreader.  This latter quality has been discovered in my Real World job and everything that is written is brought to me;  I invariably find a hundred obvious mistakes that everyone else has missed.  It all boils down to experience.
When I first started writing (I was twelve), it was by hand.  Nothing got edited!  When my typing speed overtook my handwriting, I didn't do much more than correct mistakes with a bit of Tippex.  My first PC  (it was an Amstrad....ahem) meant I could do a weeny bit more editing, but even then, I didn't do much.  I wasn't a proper writer yet and considered that everything I wrote was perfect first time.
HAH!
I turned into a Real Writer when I began the Fleet Quintet.  Working more professionally, using what is now an ancient version of Word, I was far more willing to rip things apart;  to rewrite and rewrite until it worked;  to throw out what didn't work and begin again.  Nowadays, the REAL writing for me begins when I do the Big Edit.  My writing seems - generally - to follow a particular pattern.

• The story is created in my head, then in notes.
• The first draft is an attempt to get the story down and is usually an excruciating process of self-doubt, anxiety, wordlessness, and zero inspiration.
• This "first draft" will consist of several edits, usually rewriting of earlier bits because something later on doesn't work.  So there's still a lot of plotting going on as well as character changes, even name changes.  Sometimes there are changes from third to first person.  Sometimes I restart the whole damn thing from the beginning.  But this is ALL still part of the "first draft."  I'm still getting it down on paper, as it were (or on a computer screen).
• The Big Edit comes when the first draft is finished.  I might have a rest period before I start this.  It usually entails reading the whole story in one go (or several if it's a novel) and making notes but NOT changing anything.  That comes later.  Depending on how well the first draft went, the Big Edit could vary in length.  I've been known to abandon a story altogether and then come back to it and finish it with a flourish.  It happens.
• The Red Edit is when I print out the story and read it VERY closely indeed, armed with a red pen.  This is probably closer to proofreading, though by the time I get to the Red Edit, I've already done a thorough spell and grammar check and would  have proofread it before printing it.

With my current WIP (the Prizewinner), I'm doing a combined Big and Red edit.  Hence Big Red Edit!  When I picked up the novel again a few weeks ago, half of it had already had its "red edit" but with loads of notes.  What I really wanted was to have the notes in red on the page, not on a separate bit of paper.  Instead of redoing that first half (it's a LONG novel), I'm now Red Editing chapter by chapter:

• Read the chapter through thoroughly, correctly everything on the page with red pen that you would normally do on a computer.
• Then make these corrections on the computer.  This gives you a SECOND chance to see your corrections which means you really have to think about what you are doing.

So far, this is going quite quickly.  Sometimes a red pen edit doesn't work when you see it on the screen.  Sometimes I see something on the screen that I missed.  
In the end, I'll end up with a novel that has been thoroughly overhauled, which is what I'm aiming for.

The Big Edit has begun!  And it's begun in red pen, which means I have pages of manuscript covered with little red scribbles.  My red pen leaked everywhere too so my fingers looked as if they are dripping blood.  Hugely appropriate when I consider how much of my novel I've had to cut....
I began this red edit two years ago and abandoned it in disgust.  I thought it was a bad novel and not worth saving.  It was also unbelievably long, coming in at 185K words.  No agent in the universe wants to read something that long unless it's brilliant and going to win the Booker Prize.  Picking up where I left off, however, I've discovered it's not that bad.  In fact, I got so involved in reading some bits of it, I forgot to edit it!
I spent two years working on it, from February 2015, probably the last time I've written anything without being conscious of its length (I'm more controlled these days).  I had no idea it was turning into this massive project!  I thought I was never going to finish it.  I battled with the story.  I drowned in notes.  I rewrote and restructured and rewrote some more.  I wrote more notes, more than I ever had for any story, trying to find the male character's voice, failing miserably.  In fact, it's very possible I have failed on every front when it comes to this novel.  I've referred to it before as That Difficult Novel.  In the spirit of hope and a bright future, I'm now going to call it the Prizewinner.  (I may discuss in another blog what I think is wrong with it - and why it works despite that.)
It was meant to be a brief fairy tale.  It was meant to be sensual, a woman's learning experience, a man tortured by some weird affliction that resulted in immense pain.  He was meant to be demonic, she was meant to be heroic.  It was meant to be about beauty and knowledge.
It's now none of these things.  You may catch a glimpse of Beauty and the Beast in it (hasn't THAT been done to death...) but otherwise those nobel themes have long since been lost.  As for the sensuality:  unless you really know what you're doing, you just end up with porn.  Or, worse still, Mills and Boon type porn.  I didn't want either. I'm going to have to cut about ten dripping wet sex scenes from this novel.  Somehow I'm going to have to learn to express their love and desire and all that romantic stuff in a different way.

One thing you learn in your Big Edit:  nothing is ever as terrible as you think it is.  There's always something salvageable, whether it's the story itself, the plot, or the writing.  My Prizewinner has some good writing.  It has a fantastic twist.  The story is worth reading.  But it takes too long to get going (my usual flaw) and sags in the middle.  However, the end is mindblowing.  Getting the reader to get as far as the end is my challenge!

The picture below is very much what the novel is about:  beauty, nature ... and a lot of water.