Competitions – Page 37

I’m sure the thought is shared by many; to get everything in order, ready to start the new year with fresh projects. It’s a great idea, and in the case of writers I would suggest it applies to our writing projects as much, if not more than anything else.

My own short list to start the year has solid foundations.

1. I’ve already sent my first Reader’s Letter of the year to a writing magazine.

2. The new romance, ‘Amsterdam Calling’, is underway, and I’m sending the first two chapters and synopsis as an entry into a writing competition.

3. My humorous look at marrying into the military, ‘User’s Guide: Soldier’, is being sent to a site that requests humour in any format. I’ve posted ‘User’s Guide …’ on my website, blog, Pinterest and Facebook, and I’m pleased to report that it has now been read in excess of 27,000 times.

4. One of my short stories, ‘Simply Irresistible’ is winging it’s way as a submission to a magazine, so hopefully I’ll soon be reporting acceptance.

5. However things work out with my romance novel, I intend to start work in earnest on my coming of age story, ‘A Life of Choice’.

Apart from writing, I have a good stock of books to read, both in paperback and on my Kindle. Before getting into any of my projects, I’ll spend an hour going through my tray to get me back to that state we know as ‘organised’.

Whatever you’re intentions, I wish you luck to accompany your expertise in the new year.

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I’ve now written hundreds of poems, and my short stories are well into double figures, but my latest passion is novel-writing. We all like to think our writing is to a high enough standard, but as I embark on my next story, I find that I’m still critical of every word.

Typically, I find I will write at least four drafts of anything. On many occasions it has gone on to be the eighth or ninth, before I publish my work.

The ideas are easy enough, and once the writing is underway, it only takes a few pages before I’m able to get rid of the opening paragraph, and replace it with something better. My spelling has always been reasonable, and punctuation is okay most of the time, but grammar is an area where I tend to worry.

Formatting an entire book is laborious, but I find that relatively easy in comparison to ensuring that my punctuation is correct. Everything from word choice to sentence structure is important, if we want to sell our writing, so it’s good that it should be an area to make us fret.

If I was drawing a portrait for somebody and charging money, I’d expect to spend many hours getting it as good as it could be – and though I use the same theory with my writing, I admit my grammar could be improved.

Why am I being so ultra-critical when I’ve already managed to sell copies of my first two e-books? In recent months, in support of fellow indie writers / publishers, I’ve bought five e-books. Three of them had serious issues with grammar, punctuation, and formatting, so I decided I would revisit my own work.

I took the unprecedented step of buying a proofreading programme to help me improve my writing structure. I was delighted to find that within a 3,000 word chapter, my spelling only failed me twice, and my punctuation was wrong five times. My grammar was my worry and in a series of checks on my chapters, I had the grammar 84% right. I thought that was good, but it’s not good enough, so from now on, every chapter will be checked with my new programme at every draft.

The system I’m using shall remain nameless until I return and report my progress in about a week. My reason for waiting, is because I am presently halfway through the second chapter of my new novel, ‘Amsterdam Calling’.