For the first time, eyes other than mine are looking over the words I have been poring over for well over a year. I guess it should be a scary time, but it is not. Could this be due to the story already having been released in audio format – and the very positive response I have received from many listeners? ---- All rights reserved. nd.com Read on...

Making a better book

When I gave it a little more thought, I realised something very important about this proofing process: whatever comments I receive, they can only result in a better novel.

There is no room for egos and sensitivities at this stage. If the work fails to provide its first, amateur readers with a positive experience, it stands virtually no chance of passing the infinitely more discerning eyes of a professional publisher’s reader.

Real edits

The first reader to return edits was one I trusted would not tip-toe around my sensibilities, and tell me exactly what she thought. She did not fail me. Thankfully, she enjoyed the reading, wanting to continue with the rest to learn how the story unfolds. 

Minor typos, misspellings, and glitches aside, I found most of her more significant comments matched quite closely to those areas I have either struggled with or have had a gut feeling myself that something was not  quite right. Now someone else had spotted them, there was no denying the need for a little repair.

This is not tedious (yet)

I’m enjoying this editing process. Again, I think it comes down to an underlying realisation that the book is being improved, polished, and made more complete. 

I have spotted some issues myself while going through someone else’s comments. Focusing merely on how to fix issues they have highlighted, have detached me a little from the emotion of the words, and enabled me to spot – and fix – a couple of quite significant continuity errors, plus a chronological discrepancy.

I suspect, once the editing gets down to nothing more than individual word tweaking, I will get sick of the sight of the book. But I think I’ll retain my optimism, because at that stage, it is very close to being complete.

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I regularly read about the danger of too frequent use of passive language in writing. We use passive language extensively in everyday speech as it dampens the danger of sounding aggressive. In dramatic prose, this style is fatal. ---- All rights reserved. nd.com Read on...

During those moments of full flow, instinctive writing, I tend to get overly passive, even in the heat of the action. That is just fine, as the writing is in the editing. Returning to the text months later, I discovered a copious splattering of passive verbs; time to dust off the scythe and and scrub the text into

Some examples

Spotting active and passive verbs is relatively straightforward. Here is an couple of examples:

• Brian was offering his hand in greeting. [passive]
• Brian offered his hand in greeting. [active]

The key to spotting the passive verb is, in most cases, the use of “was”. This led me to a straightforward method of activating my passive texts.

Kill the was

I searched for every instance of “was” throughout my text, each time reworking the sentence to remove it. Sometimes a simple matter of removing the “was” and changing its associated verb, other times a more colourful word replaced it.

Is it really that simple? Yes. Though some sentences will be tougher than others to adjust, I managed to remove the majority of “wases” which resulted in a far snappier and active form of writing.

Here are some genuine examples from my texts (I really don’t need to tell you which are passive, do I?):

• The opportunity to move was approaching
• The opportunity to move approached

• The sound was echoing as though behind it there was a vast, empty cavern
• The sound echoed as though behind it stretched a vast, empty cavern

• Jack was beaming from ear to ear
• Jack beamed from ear to ear

It seems obvious, doesn’t it? But when wrapped up in the editing process, trying to remember all the advice on what one should and should not do, simple, straightforward techniques such as this cut through the waffle and achieve marked improvements.

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GTD requires you to make decisions. These decisions categorise your tasks – in this case emails – into what needs doing right now, and what can be left until later. ---- All rights reserved. nd.com Read on...

It is critical to be strict and realistic with your decision making. If something really does not have to be completed immediately, do not mark it as such. Conversely, if something can be completed tomorrow without creating any problems, but it would be nice to have it done today, do not be tempted to mark it for immediate action.

What’s that? Procrastination? No. It is about deciding what must be done compared to what does not have to be done. Once you have cleared immediate tasks, there may be time to complete additional tasks.

How to reach inbox zero without deleting everything important

If you have an inbox bursting at the seams, here’s how you deal with it on the first run through.

1. Create three new GMail labels: “@action”, “@deferred”, “@waiting”
   These are your GTD context labels, they mean, respectively, “needs doing now/today”, “needs doing later”, “needs someone else to do something first”. The “@” symbol is merely a visual indicator that these labels are unlike any others and will also place them more accessibly at the top of your labels list.
   Give your labels appropriate colours: strong red for @action, for example, so each applied message draws attention to itself in any mixed listing. 
2. Repeat after me: my inbox is transient: it is not for storage!
   
3. Your inbox should contain only the items about which you have not made a decision
   and, if appropriate, not assigned a context label. If you have read an email, then you should also have decided what to do about it, if anything, and it therefore should no longer be in your inbox.
4. Go through your entire inbox page with the following rules:
   1. If the email requires a response/task today, mark it @action
   2. If the email requires a response/task in the future, mark it @deferred
   3. If your are waiting on a response on an existing conversation, mark it @waiting 
   4. If the email does not require any action, leave it (or delete it) and move to the next.
5. Select all your emails and push the “Archive” button.
   Boom, there they go, if your inbox was only one page: you have achieved the fabled “inbox zero”
6. Keep going through your inbox pages in the same way.
   Once you are checking emails that are more than a week back in time, chances are you’re in email territory that do not require to action, so Archive the lot. Archive emails still exist within “All Mail” menu item and get returned with search results.

Now for your daily regime

Each and every morning, as your very first task, do the following:

1. As above with your inbox 
   It is very important to resist actually doing any tasks at this stage, merely filter them by context label to get that inbox cleared as quickly as possible – it gives a huge psychological boost!
   Make a decision there and then. One of the problems with emails is we tend to keep making decisions about what is in the list over and over again during the day, searching for what’s important and what is not.
2. Go through your @deferred label emails and define @action to any that you need to do that day
3. Go through your @waiting label emails and look for any that need to be @action to chase a response, for example.
4. Go into your @action label emails and do what needs doing
   one by one, removing the @action label each time they are dealt with – add @waiting label if your are requiring a response. Take care not to add @waiting to everything, only those you need to receive an actual response.
   When going through the @action emails, I follow these rules:      
   1. If it will take less than a minute to respond/complete the task, do it immediately before going to the next email.
   2. If it will take longer than a minute, add it as a task to your main GTD solution (Things, Omnifocus, moleskine, day’s task list – if you use one) 
   3. Once all that day’s immediate @action emails have been cleared, do those that will take a little longer.
   4. If you come across an email in @action and think you could leave util the next day, don’t just leave it, move it immediately to @deferred
      It’s vital to learn trust in what exists within each label context, otherwise you end up checking and re-checking just in case.

One important point is to give thought to what you dump under your @action label. There’s only so much you can realistically get done in a day, so try to be strict with what absolutely has to get done that day. Then, if you manage to clear @action you feel great, and you can always pop into @deferred and find a new bunch of actionable emails.

If you do not clear your @action messages in a single day, then you must re-evaluate your criteria for selecting what to @action. My main GTD task list rarely contains more than 10-12 @action items in a particularly day as, on average and due to the nature of some of my tasks, it is very rare for me to complete more than this many individual tasks in a single day. It is psychologically much better to clear a list of tasks then go grab some more, than to constantly see a task list that is never complete.

The result 

Using this system gives me inbox zero usually by 8 a.m. each morning (because most of my incoming emails appear overnight) on both work and personal inbox. I can then schedule my email handling time during the day based on how much needs doing.

You can add other “@” labels, of course (I have been pondering a @toread action for stuff that needs reading but not actually doing as a task or responding), but I don’t suggest you add more than another two or three as you’ll add unnecessary levels of complexity  and end up not really knowing or trusting where everything has been put and it makes the initial morning inbox-clearing decision making process much slower. This clearing should be an almost immediate decision of where to assign the email.

GMail Labs

There’s a gmail Labs addition that enables you to move your labels panel from the left to the right of the screen, I’ve found that’s really helpful in reminding me it’s there and giving me quick access to my context labels.

Inbox zero

I have found the now regular sight of an empty inbox a very positive psychological boost to banishing the feeling of email overload. 

Keep your GTD solution simple. GTD, being easily customised to your own perceived needs, can rapidly become so bloated with unnecessary processes that the GTD process itself becomes as big a point of stress as the still mounting tasks. I promise you, if you keep it simple, you will be more productive, and most importantly, your task-stress levels will reduce.

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There are pros and cons to this method as you might imagine. As the Persistent Spirit story begins to enter its final phase and the end of the book is on the horizon, I find myself contemplating whether I might undergo the same process for the second book, A Shot in Time. ---- All rights reserved. nd.com Read on...

The cons

Time: writing and recording an episode consumes 15-20 hours of effort. Maintaining that each week with an increasingly demanding and unpredictable day-job has been, frankly, stressful.

Structure: episodes have a completely different structure to a novel, requiring continuing momentum, restructured scenes, and some point of tension at the end of each one. Unedited, this brings the novel a strange, pulse-like pace which now needs a further re-write.

The pros

Progress: episodes promoted regular writing. I believe I am further along in the story than I would have been without to self imposed demands of a regular episodic production.

Story momentum: despite the structure issue mentioned above, the story has a pace and continues to move along ithout getting bogged down and sluggish. Once the “episodic pulse” is edited out I think the novel will have an enhanced page-turning pace.

Feedback: reaching out with even an unpolished story to potential audience around the globe has generated feedback that has helped both encourage the work and help shape it.

What’s in store for 2009?

Not another audio book, that’s for sure. The pros most certainly outweigh the cons, so the audio book of the second Table Rappers book must correct some of the negatives of this years’ experience. Most importantly is the frustration from being unable to produce regular, weekly episodes. Book two (titled A Shot in Time) will not be released as serialised audio until it has completed the second draft.

That does not mean there will be nothing from the Table Rappers in 2009, however. I’m planning some short story dramatised episodes, including a cast of actors, full sound effects, etc. Doesn’t that mean even more work? Yes, but the work flow can be controlled around the production, and such a project is free from an ongoing, weekly deadline.

2009 is already promising to be a challenging year on both personal and professional fronts, so careful planning will be essential to achievement of my goals. I’m thoroughly looking forward to what might prove to be a formative year for the future!

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How you would achieve this, I have no idea. How I am – well on the way to – achieving this is what this post is about. Some of this may work for you, or not. ---- All rights reserved. nd.com Read on...

The first draft is crap – deal with it

That reality was one of the toughest ideas to overcome – understanding that it is just fine to write a first draft that you would only consider using as lavatory paper (and then only in secret just in case anyone gets even a glimpse of the text). No one will read the first draft. With my first draft, not even me! I’ll get to why in just a moment, but first another important step: I stopped editing.

Once I came to terms with the prospect of writing rubbish I began to be far more productive, but very soon fell back into the pit of over eager editing and the resulting snail’s pace in progress because I was editing too much too early.

A pen and a Moleskine

I learned writing by hand prevented editing beyond a scribbled-out paragraph or two and a scrawled note in some nearby free space. I calculated that my handwriting would squeeze around 90,000 words into a standard Moleskine lined notebook (spend money on a decent quality notebook so you are less inclined to actually use it as toilet paper later).

This process brought me to a first draft in a couple of months. The pages filled, the story unfolded, and I found myself rapidly heading to the start of the second draft.

I kept the pace of the writing moving forward as consistently as possible. When something blocked that momentum or where some scene or action could not be worked through at that point, I simply wrote “stuff happens here to get them to the station” or similar. Can’t deal with it now? Then move on and deal with it later – you’re going to have to re-write it all anyway!

Engagement

Writing by hand seemed to have the additional benefit of embedding the text deeper into memory, to the extent that, while writing the second draft, I rarely have to reference the notebook. This is good because I do not have the neatest handwriting, particularly when ideas are in full flow.

More of the right tools

The second draft had to be transferred into some electronic form. Having as much love for Microsoft Word as a Marmite encrusted stick of celery, it took some time and exploration to discover Scrivener. This tool does what I need it to, doesn’t try to teach me how to write, doesn’t get in the way when I want to write, and has just the right level of organisation and customisability to tailor it to my needs, while ensuring I do not lose endless hours messing with too many needless settings. It’s not perfect, but it’s just right for me.

I do not use post-its or cards stuck to cork boards to play with the story, but I frequently use my large whiteboard for brainstorming plot points and working through the odd character crisis. Whiteboards are essential.

The serialised audiobook

Now this stage is likely not for everyone, but starting early 2008 I committed myself to releasing the second draft of the novel as a weekly 20 minute audio book. This established a predictable regime of writing around 3,500 words per week and structuring the work to ensure the story is continually developing in order to keep the audience’s attention. It means not only I am imposing a deadline, but so are those who email me in anticipation of the next episode.

The process also forced me to read the text aloud, frequently bringing to light issues with the text, grammar errors, plot problems, and particularly highlighting poor dialogue, which could be immediately fixed. Being the second draft, the audio version is not perfect by any means, but the benefits of this part of my process far outweighs concerns over an uncorrected error here and there.

Vacations, sickness and work trips aside, this has kept me on track. It is not without its stress, of course, as I am adding several hours each week in recording, editing, mixing and publishing the audio files, plus online promotion and building an audience. I currently have well over 90,000 words under my belt. Without this self imposed routine, I am convinced this book would not be as far along as it is right now.

What’s next?

A third draft will be necessary, as will having a trusted friend or two reading the text and providing constructive criticism. The text must be edited to improve pace and flow in some areas, of that I am already aware. And certain (and irritating to me) aspects of my natural and imperfect writing style have to be polished.

There’s a lot more work to be done and since that is in the future I do not feel able to discuss a process that I have not yet personally applied – so more on this subject in other posts.

I am looking forward to starting on the second book in the series, with the knowledge and experience of the first behind me. I may find a slightly different process, or an identical one. Processes are always subject to change, but one thing of which I am absolutely certain is that its first draft will be hand written in a spanking new Moleskine.

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Today’s the day I have been planning for since November, and it has arrives: the first Chapter Episode of Persistent Spirit is live!

TABLE RAPPERS – PERSISTENT SPIRIT
CHAPTER 1
Doctor Matthew Keynes pays his weekly visitation and meets with dear friends, but his night is anything but agreeable.

Story running time: 22 minutes
Total running time: 36 minutes

Available from TableRappers.com or here:

Or you can listen right here

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