January 21, 2016

Cutting down to the bones makes your writing stronger

It's scary to go by your gut when you hardly have experience writing and consider yourself a rookie and tend to look up to the masters and doubt your every decision and agonize, agonize, agonize. You really start to bloom when you stop agonizing, and you don't stop agonizing until you learn to trust your gut. And that is very hard. How can you trust it when there are all these other writers who know better? You think they know better because they've been writing longer than you, they wrote more books than you, better books than you, and so on. You can drive yourself crazy thinking these thoughts.

I'm certainly nowhere near trusting my gut fully yet, but it comes in waves and it happens more often. The latest test of that trust is happening right now in the shape of me hacking and slashing and cutting and ripping at the second draft of TUBE whilst making it into Draft 3, which is resulting in prose that is so lean and minimal and bony that it makes me scared, and yet somewhere in the darkest farthest corners of my gut I feel that what I'm doing is right.

January 8, 2016

Excerpt from TUBE, Draft 3

by Ksenia Anske

I'm writing again, at last, and many things are new. The calm is new. The lack of anxiety is new. It's weird. I don't know where it's coming from. I no longer force myself to produce 2K words a day, though I count daily words still, as a way of giving myself an idea of how much I wrote. I write about 5 hours a day, roughly from 9AM till 2 PM, and for the first time I'm writing into a new clean file, occasionally glancing at the old file for Draft 2. It's curiously liberating. I don't have to adhere to the old structure nor do I have to write over old stuff and fix it. I can write fresh.

This is something, I tell you. I'm loving it. At the pace I'm going, this draft should be done in about 2 months, and it will need one more draft (to polish it) before publishing. I'm cutting out A LOT and simplifying A LOT. So far 89 pages are gone, and I'm only on page 31.

If you want to read my daily writing, pledge $1 per month on Patreon, and voila! YOU WILL BE PLAGUED BY NIGHTMARES. So here it is for you, the opening.

July 20, 2015

TUBE excerpt. Draft 2. Chapter 1. Red Shoes

by Ksenia Anske

I have completely forgotten about my tradition to post the first chapter of a new draft here. It tells you how much this book has pulled me away from reality. This, and the fact that I haven't blogged in a week. That's unheard of.

Like I mentioned already, something new is happening. My process is changing. Also, my daily routine is changing. Now in the mornings, before I start writing, I go over the list of new words that have accumulated from yesterday's reading, and look up their meanings in Russian, English, their etymology and, if applicable, images. As a result my ability to absorb new vocabulary has accelerated. I have also created 24 little files for every character, and am populating each with specific speech inflections to keep track of (and translating tons of idioms from Russian to English). This is also new and takes up time.

June 24, 2015

Why it's a bad idea to over-edit

by Ksenia Anske

There is a reason editors exist, and I think that reason is simply the need to slap writers' hands and stop them from editing where no editing is needed.

So I'm proofreading The Badlings, right? And this thing has already been through 5 drafts and 2 editing scrubs and is supposed to be final, then I catch this clumsy description that is very important. It shows a major world change, yet I glossed over it. Here it is (WARNING!!! Spoilers.):

April 9, 2015

Getting over the slog in the middle of a draft

by Ksenia Anske

I'm smack in the middle of this stinking swamp right now. It's oozing at me green tentacles of slime and fuming my nose a mix of noxious gases and...well, it happens in every book I write, but only now do I see it clearly and know what it is, this dreadful viscous middle of a draft when the excitement of the beginning has worn off and the catharsis of the ending is too far away to be felt yet. I'm in the middle of the first draft of TUBE, at exactly 49K words, and it's fucking dragging.