Time flies when you’re doing home improvement projects. Real life does take precedence over the book—especially when a baby is on its way—but I’ve gotten some additional editing done.

Also, I’ve got another annotation up, this time for dedications and acknowledgements (And I revised the Maps section because I didn’t like the way it read before).

Just an update…

In my personal life, some good news. I just found out that our baby will be of the male variety, due date is still Jan 10th.

I’ve decided on a title for the NaNoWriMo project I’d like to do this year. It will be The Tragedy of Larimosa.

I’ve still been editing Five Rings every day and am quite excited about how it’s turning out. Some of my close friends have been reading the results of my work, so I’ve been trying to have one or two chapters edited to official ‘Doesn’t Suck’ status by Wednesday of each week.

I’m going to try to put up new annotations each Wednesday, too. But we’ll see how far that goes. …

Here’s the three annotations for Five Rings thus far:

By some miracle, I’ve been editing every day since my last post. I seem to have my groove back!—Here’s hoping it sticks around for awhile.

My recent success of revising/editing nineteen pages in the last 48 hours made me feel like I could break away from this project long enough to post another annotation. This time, I speak about the actual title of the book FIVE RINGS and the reasons behind my choice. Read the rest of this entry »

I try to remind myself that I can say something today that I couldn’t say last year, and honestly wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to say: I’m done with my first draft! I’m in the editing/revision step. How would me-one-year-ago feel if I could go into the future and read this post?

I have-to-have-to-have-to keep editing if I ever want to finish this novel, seek publication, go to places like Worldcon and World Fantasy, network and meet people, and have fun writing more novels.  And I intend to do just that. But I can’t just write ‘I need to get scene X done by date Y’. It’s never been that simple for me; conventional methods never seem to work. Read the rest of this entry »

I know I haven’t posted in a moon or two, and I wish I could tell you I’ve been editing this whole time. But let’s just say slow and not-so-steady isn’t working very well.

I’ve gone through the conceptualization of Five Rings and two sequel novels, designed outlines, wrote the entire first book, and now all that’s left is the editing/re-writing.

I thought things would be easy from here. I have the weight of all those steps behind me just crushing me to get finished… but…

What I need is a way to inspire myself to commit to sitting down and editing more often. It’s harder for me to sit down and edit than it has been for me to write. I didn’t expect it to be so difficult. Maybe it’s because the changes I make feel more permanent this time around. I more or less have to get it right this time, you know? Or maybe it’s because a few of my author friends seem to have stopped writing altogether, which is a thought that has depressed me quite a bit.

It’s not that I haven’t been working on Five Rings at all, but, too regularly, I’ve been letting other things distract me. My usual method is to try and get distractions out of my system through oversaturation, but this time I’m starting to feel guilty.

I know there’s a lot of great writers sitting down right now editing. Some of which conceptualized, outlined, wrote, edited, and rewrote all in the time it took me to write my first draft. And that’s what I’ve been telling myself lately to keep my damn butt in this chair. Maybe if I can channel the energies of all these wonderfully dedicated writers and feel some sort of virtual kinship to them, it’ll encourage me to sit down and edit, too. 

But any further advice is welcome.