52 Weeks of Editing

A collection of 50 posts

52 Weeks of Editing

52 Weeks of Writing: Week 52—The end is the beginning.

Here we are. Week 52. In the first week of January this year (2023), I set out to edit and re-develop the original Amnar manuscripts so they could be published. Maybe I'd do a series on Tuesday Serial. Maybe I'd try to get them published traditionally.

52 Weeks of Editing

52 Weeks of Writing: Week 51—The inevitable rambling on Christmas Eve.

Here we are, at last. Not quite the end (that's next week), but this is the date I started writing the original Amnar books, twenty years ago. Last year, I picked up the manuscripts from their dust-gathering shelves, and decided to spend a year editing them to see

52 Weeks of Editing

52 Weeks of Writing: The missing week 40 and the Facebook livestream idea

💡(I couldn't understand why I seemed to have an extra week left over... I didn't do a week 40. So this is week 40. Honest.) This is not what I planned for this week's post. Not that I ever plan these posts in any

52 Weeks of Editing

52 Weeks of Writing: Week 50—I had a meltdown and the psychologist threatened to call the police.

I'm not sure how to start this week. Last week's episode of "What the F happened to me between 2009 and 2014 (or, to be fair, 2017)" was a rough cut. I wanted to write the only thing I really know about the first

52 Weeks of Editing

52 Weeks of Writing: Week 49—Stare into the abyss long enough and it'll send you more paperwork.

I wake up and it’s dark but it’s also not. Two rooms overlap with distinctly different hues; one is my bedroom in the flat, with its exposed brickwork and plain off-white walls. The light cuts through the gaps between the blinds. It’s never entirely dark because the

52 Weeks of Editing

52 Weeks of Writing: Week 48—The eviction hearing and other waiting rooms.

OK, where were we? Over the last two weeks, I've been starting to pick over the bones of the last fourteen years—oh god, has it really been that long?—in an effort to explain how I got here. How I ended up doing two PhDs, how my

52 Weeks of Editing

52 Weeks of Writing: Week 47—I got the eviction notice on my birthday.

I got the eviction notice on my thirty-first birthday. I remember sitting at my table, a ridiculously big and stupid table I'd had since Lancaster days, and hearing the car engine down below. I remember that my windows overlooked the postboxes to the building, and I remember how,

52 Weeks of Editing

52 Weeks of Writing: Week 46—How do I tell the story of how I got here?

I have a story to tell you. It's a story I've been meaning to tell for a long time. No, wait. That's not how it goes. This is a story I never wanted to tell and I never planned to tell. It was a

52 Weeks of Editing

52 Weeks of Writing: Week 45—A mug fell on my head.

This is not going according to plan. Not that I had a plan, but still. I say under duress because if I hadn't said I'd write every week for a year, I wouldn't write at all this week. It's Sunday evening, and

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52 Weeks of Editing

52 Weeks of Writing: Week 44—Burnout

52 Weeks of Editing

52 Weeks of Writing: Week 43—The coming few weeks will be a little bit different.

I am digging myself up out of the burnout grave this week with a bit of an odd post. Not penguins again, but more like an introduction to the odd posts that are going to pop up in the next couple of weeks. I might have set myself an utterly

52 Weeks of Editing

52 Weeks of Writing: Week 42—The answer to life, the universe, and everything is maybe this.

I've always thought the number 42 was special because I'm a Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy fan. I wanted my forty-second birthday to be more special than my fortieth for that reason. If I'd made any plans to set up the forty-second

52 Weeks of Editing

52 Weeks of Writing: Week 41—Lessons from Writing a Series of Prompt Challenges

Well, you may have noticed a bit of a change this week. It's Spooky Season, it's the last month before Nanowrimo, and it's my first week of teaching. I feel like I've been running very fast and still not keeping up with

52 Weeks of Editing

52 Weeks of Writing: Week 39—From another world

Hello. I'm reporting in from the stern of a narrowboat somewhere in the East Midlands of the UK. This is my first long, proper holiday since 2019, when I flew out to Rome with T and friends. After that, there was a pandemic, and although we went away

52 Weeks of Editing

52 Weeks of Writing: Week 38: Shadow work for developing characters and plot

For the last week, I've been digging into the idea of shadow characters and shadow work. If you haven't encountered this aspect of storytelling before, the basic concept is that characters (or even groups of characters) around the main character, represent dark features of the protagonist&

52 Weeks of Editing

52 Weeks of Writing: Week 37—I did this course so you don't have to.

Allow me to hold my hand up and say I haven't written any actual fiction over the last week. That total word count has been sitting at just over 80k words for what feels like a long time. We're at a knife-edge moment, and I'

52 Weeks of Editing

52 Weeks of Writing: Week 36—Burnt out like burnt toast

Oh boy no. Last weekend was a blistering run of success, at least in terms of writing out a somewhat decent first draft of an account of Amnar, thanks to a Deck of Worlds prompt. But, as is typical of my life, the minute I get up to speed, I

52 Weeks of Editing

52 Weeks of Writing: Week 35—Trying to Recover from Trauma (A Story About A Writing Process)

Every Friday morning, sometime between the first and second coffee of the day, I have therapy for an hour. It's a tricky time to have a session like that. On the one hand, it's Friday, which means I can set up my editing week so I

52 Weeks of Editing

52 Weeks of Writing: Week 34—When the thing you need to write suddenly won't work for you

This week has been a crisis, climax, recovery type of week in my writing world. In order to understand this, you need to know that I write on a site called 4TheWords. It's an RPG game that's also about writing. I discovered it by accident back

52 Weeks of Editing

52 Weeks of Writing: Week 33—Let's Talk About Writer's Block and Mental Health

My god, it's week 33. How did we get here? It's been thirty-three whole weeks, and in that time I've written two halves of two different books and not done the original editing I was planning to do at all. This isn't

52 Weeks of Editing

52 Weeks of Writing: Week 32—Tracking Words Between Nanowrimo Months

I've tried to start this week's post three times. Maybe five. I'm no good at this whole blogging thing. I have no idea how to do it in 2023, when things have moved on from the days of Open Diary and just writing whatever

52 Weeks of Editing

52 Weeks of Writing: Week 31—What Matters In Storytelling As Demonstrated By Penguins

Let's talk about penguins. Specifically, let's talk about how penguins can help us learn about how to write good, compelling story structure.

52 Weeks of Editing

52 Weeks of Writing: Week 30—My therapist told me to do this.

I'm writing this in bed, on a warm Friday afternoon, and I feel like bursting into tears. Maximum menstrual potential unfolding here. For a week I had a fever. As the fever died, the period struck. My cat and I have so far spent most of today in

52 Weeks of Editing

52 Weeks of Writing: Week 29—How to make a necromantic skull

Introduction You know when you get that pre-cold feeling? Hmm, yeah. That's how I'm feeling today. It's been an incredible week with my family and friends. But graduation day is a strange thing. Six years of work preparing for the PhD and doing the

52 Weeks of Editing

52 Weeks of Writing: Week 28—A word about pronouns

Intro Well, it's been a week. A real week. I've had so many different things going on, things I didn't really want to have to deal with the week before I graduate. I've been a tad stressed out, let's put