The boat 'MISS BAUDET' is a garden, party venue, writers' retreat and HQ for serious meetings with my publisher David

Sunday 7 January 2018

Getting Serious

For Florida Key, the plot-line was inspired by a bike-radio

It's Sunday today.
I have almost a whole day to get on with some work on Florida Key.
Editing, editing, editing. The willpower required to get on with it is enormous.
It's very easy to get side-tracked into doing something else.
Like now.
So before I begin with that, I thought I'd do a blog post.
Today, no more jokes - this is now SERIOUS.

For anyone remotely interested in knowing what the key stages are in 'how to write a book', here they are (for this author, at least), divided into segments;
THE STORY, THE PROCESS, THE PRODUCTION, THE PUBLICITY, THE LAUNCH, THE MARKETING, and hopefully THE SELLING:

THE STORY
1. Get an idea (easy)
2. Think up a rough plot-line (easy)
3. Begin writing the first draft (still quite easy)
4. Work out how the story can develop (getting harder)
5. Keep writing to the end (hard)
6. Read over what you've written (easy)
7. Make sense of it all (impossible)
8. Go back and make some corrections (work)
9. Re-write the whole thing and repeat points 1-8 above until 2nd draft is complete (frustrating)
10. Re-write again until 3rd draft is finished (satisfying)

After THE STORY comes THE PROCESS, and I'll cover that in the next blog-post.
Because now I really must get on with EDITING, and not BLOGGING.

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