How to Breathe Underwater (trilogy: Lessons in Skills for Life) (Page 5 of 8)

BAMF! has been used for the noise of air displacement from teleporting.  Maybe  'djomp'?

I'm a little behind in the commentary, so I'd like to give you a leg up, Lynne.

First, don't make any drastic changes during a time of stress. Like a person going through a divorce, you need distance before you sell your house, move to a new area, switch jobs, or change your novel.

I want to give compliments where compliments are due. You have the building blocks that few others have. You already know how to write. Now you are working on the hard part...finding your story. You already have a Voice, so I wouldn't worry too much about that. The urgent issue is to keep going. Keep writing. Dogged persistence pays great dividends.

Don't you dare give up.

I've found that stressful times are rotten for creating new work. However, they are great for revising, spellchecking, and rereading reviews. I produce the best work when I'm happy, and I've had a lot on my plate lately. Yesterday, a friend told me to write a book and put my brain into writing. She wants the whole package condensed into one tome. I told her to get cracking, because I had other projects that needed finishing first.

I'm sorry about your kitty. I know what it is like to love something that much that money doesn't matter. Take a deep breath. My thoughts are with you.

Truth :-)

Amazing LONG Skype call with my agent, working through the new draft.

I am going to excise the first 50 pages or so, and start rewriting half-way through Part One, the sooner to get to Part two and the real action.

I will be losing so much nice writing, it makes me want to throw up, but it is so necessary.
So, I may be away for a while.
But send me coffee and chocolate and all shall be good in the end.

I wouldn't honestly go so far as to say I am optimistic, but I have a new start point, and I can only work hard at it and see what comes out of it.  Thanks for all your support, guys, much appreciated.

There are linear thinkers, who organized , research, and plot out chapters. I am a patterner, and I pluck scenes from various inspirations and stitch them together later.

In writing, this is just a technique. In medicine, it was a HUGE disadvantage for me. I had to learn to speak linear as a survival tactic. 95% of doctors are linear thinkers. Linear was when I stitched the story together in one continuous thread.

You have plenty of time for that E.

The advantage is that once patterners master their craft, they get MUCH better at the craft than linear. Without formal training, I was out reading CT scans and correcting radiologists. Took me ten years, but hey:-)

I have a similar process, but instead of a character, I start with an idea. Take my short story "The Weight of Sufferance", for instance. My basic idea when I started that story was "best friends who are complete opposites". I wrote a few random scenes, the characters popped out from there and honestly, I was three-quarters of the way through the story before I realized there was no real plot. I finally threw in grandma's attic and somehow, it tied it all together.

The nice thing about TNBW is that the reviews don't go away. You don't have to edit the chapter immediately after a review. Let it sit for a while and come back for edits later. I have a few chapters like that, where they are in dire need of editing, but I've resolved to avoid touching them in any capacity until my first draft is done. I had several plot ideas not long after joining TNBW and now my first 4-ish chapters (except the very first one) still need complete rewrites.

E, I thought you might like this about draught/draft, especially the Canadian irritation in the comments
http://grammarist.com/spelling/draft-draught/

The draft/draught thing totally makes sense, just another one of those English vs. American English things (another one: story/storey). It just made me pause for a moment, and I like to make note of that since it's usually an indicator of a rough patch in the writing (in this case, it was not). I'll likely still point those out to you in the future, just so you're aware of the differences to an American reader. Someone who doesn't pay as close attention to the spelling as myself might mistake the word for "drought", since draught is so rarely used over here, especially in books targeted toward younger audiences.

Oh, I believe that at one time the British used 'draught' for all the meanings given in the article.  You might have to go back to early Agatha Christie, or even to Sherlock Holmes.  The sense was 'draw' as in pull or withdraw.