Its Friday again and what a short week that was.

Lifting the veil on a writing life #2

This is week two of an audio diary about my writing life.

From an authentically selfish point of view, this is helping with my accountability and motivation. Last week I had a couple of comments saying how relatable it was, and that is my aim here, to show the hidden parts of something so hermit-like in nature.

Having said that I’m unsure the veil can ever be completely lifted on how someone writes a book because it’s such an individual thing. You can never see the inside of my head, I can only ever try and explain it to you.

So this week I thought I’d be clever and transcribe the audio. It turns out that as good as the software is to do this, the editing I’ve had to do to make it close to readable was pretty extensive. It took me way longer than I expected, so I’m unsure if I’ll do the transcription of this segment again. Any feedback on this is appreciated.

For posterity, the transcription is below, I highly recommend you listen instead though!

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My recommendations as mentioned in the audio;

• Janelle Hardacre and her walk.

A self-coaching walk

• Austin Kleon and his 30-Day Challenge

  30-day challenge

• Calliope’s Writers.

• My editor, Vicky Brewster.

• Otter. A.I.

• Scrivener.

The transcription (edited somewhat, for clarity)

Welcome to week two of these updates on my writing life. I've gotten a bit more slick, this time because I'm enlisting the help of a couple of apps, which I have been using this week. The first has been sitting on my phone for about two months. You may have already heard of it, it's called Otter. It's an AI transcription service.

Let me talk you through what I've done with it this week.

I am recording this audio now. So I'm doing the voice on Audacity and I'm using Otter to transcribe it. So I can have the words as a post on my Substack as well as the audio for people who prefer words. So I'm using it for that, but the other day I used it for writing a piece of flash fiction. I'm a member of a flash fiction writers’ group. We meet online and are over two years old now. So it did start during the pandemic. We've lost one member, she occasionally comes back but there's five of us now and it's a nice small group, and we send a piece of flash fiction to each other every month. And then we meet the following week to discuss it.

Lo and behold, because I'm working on this novel, I hadn't written anything new. And when I say flash fiction, I'm thinking between 300 and 1000 words so a story that is contained within that number of words. I had just read a post on Substack from Janelle Hardacre, she has a Substack called because she has to and she was discussing taking herself on a walk and answering some questions while she was walking. About what she wanted to do and where she wanted to go. Bit of a self-coaching call. I thought to myself, Oh, that's really juicy. I decided not to do the walking part because I was in a rush to do this bit of fiction.

I just made something up on the spot and recorded it in Otter. And it's the quickest 300/400 words I've ever written. It took less than five minutes for a piece of flash fiction that just came out of my head. Almost like a subconscious thing because you must access a different part of your brain when you're talking. It's not planned unless you are doing a speech, and it's not really a planned story. It is linked to something else I'm working on. So I do have a character in mind. And it was just a little section of her story. So it's it could be used as a flash and it could be used as part of this bigger work that I'm thinking of for later on, maybe next year I'll get to work on it.

So yes, I'd recommend Jannelle's piece, I would recommend Otter and as for how I'm going with my actual novel editing, I am going to do another recommendation here; Austin Kleon.

I've been a follower of his work for years, he does these 30-Day Challenge sheets. It's literally this very analogue PDF, you can go to the post- I’ll link to it, and you can print it out. He does 29-day challenges if it's a leap year. So you stick it on your wall and you put a nice big cross on each day when you've done whatever you're trying to do. I've written that I'm going to edit my novel for one hour each day, for 30 days. And I'll try and do more than an hour sometimes. Sometimes it’s all I can get done, but it's the consistency, it's sitting down each day and remembering where you're up to.

I remember last week when I did this (audio diary #1). I was going on about the fact that I couldn't remember where I was up to each time. And it's because I wasn't sitting down to it every day. I was sort of having the weekend off, the bank holidays, kids off school, you know, teacher strikes. You've almost got to have that continuous connection to the work in order to remember things like where you were up to in order for you to make progress on it rather than repeating the same scenes or the same beat in the novel or whatever it is.

In addition to that, the bit that I was stuck on last week I've actually made progress with and I've moved on to the next section I'm using a technique that I've somebody shared with me in another writer’s group; Calliope’s Writers, on Mighty Networks. Georgina who is the one that started the group (she is a writing coach) suggested that I start a spreadsheet of all of the stuff I'm working on each day. And I kind of rolled my eyes and was like, Oh, I really hate spreadsheets, please no more spreadsheets. I've already got spreadsheets for loads of things. But the particular day when she suggested it I was really struggling- like what the hell is going on? Why do I keep getting stuck on this bit? So I started a spreadsheet and it's literally just the date, and the name of the novel that I'm working on. And the next column is notes.

I started writing and because I wasn't writing the actual novel, I was writing about what I was writing (very meta) and the struggle with it. Something unlocked in me and I ended up coming with coming up with a couple of ideas that might solve the problem. But if I hadn't written that down, I'm not sure I would have come up with those ideas as quickly or as easily. So now I'm trying to do after every hour of editing, I'm going to the spreadsheet and just literally writing in the day, writing in the book The book's title and I'm just basically saying where I'm up to. So today, for example, I've written finally sorted beat two moving on to beat three. I'm switching some scenes around today and it's just just that one line. Obviously, I've had an easier day of it today. But some of the other entries are quite, you know, quite a bit longer because I've been struggling but by writing it down, I've solved problems.

If I've not already mentioned it I am using Scrivener. It's an amazing piece of software, there is a bit of a learning curve. But it gives you the ability to just move scenes around within the book or create chapters or organise it however you wish to organise it. It is just amazing. I can't imagine having to scroll through an 80,000 Word document, you know on Microsoft Word or even in Google Docs. Google Docs has got some hacks where you can chapterize it and things like that, but I've already learned Scrivener so don't need to learn that as well.

The other thing that is my big news for this week is that I've enlisted an editor. I have committed to finishing these edits and then sending the manuscript on to my editor. She's called Vicky Brewster and she worked on Earthly Bodies with me and she just really helped me solve some problems with that. And it was my first novel so she probably has to deal with a lot of newbie kind of mistakes like dialogue, punctuation, commas, all that sort of thing. So I think I've improved since then. But I really trust her and she really gets my work and guess what I'm trying to do so.

So that's basically given me a real kick up the bum in terms of having a fixed deadline. I need to get her the full manuscript probably by September, which is my birthday, which might be nice to sort of get rid of it before my birthday. I'm going to send her some sample pages by the start of July. She wants them from the middle which is always a bit like oh, no, I've not worked on the middle as much as I've worked on the start. But yeah, I've committed to that now. And having that deadline will make me sit down again ad again to continue with the edits, rather than being quite nebulous and seeing how I feel on the day.