Stephanie Gunn

A week away from writing (and mostly reading – I took a huge bag of books with me, and only opened one to read properly.  And that was a reread – Bold as Love, which for some reason I’d been craving to read again).

The last few days Story has been invading my brain again.  Some feedback from my betas on The White Raven has gotten me pondering the start of the novel, and how I should be doing things better.  I don’t think I’ll be going back to rewrite anything at this stage, but there may be changes when I get to the next draft.

The husband is still on holidays this week, and I’m thinking that I may keep him some company and stay away from the word mines until next week.  I may make some notes and I need to do some pondering on a potential short story.  But mostly, I think I need to catch on some reading and refilling of the well.

We won’t mention the million things that I need to do around the house, as well.  Probably because I won’t actually get around to doing them

Will be mostly offline for the next week while the husband and I drive around down south.

I’ll be checking email and possibly blogging a little bit, but likely not returning email or messages.

See you next Sunday!

As some of you may have noticed (or possibly not, since I believe most people read these posts through LJ or dreamwidth), I’ve been messing about with the website a little bit of late.

I’ve been changing the site appearance back and forth a bit, and have settled (I think) on a template for the time being that I’m happy with.

I still have a tonne of website stuff I want to put up, namely some actual writing samples, but those will have to wait for a little while.  Just to show that, yanno, I do actually write, and don’t just blog randomly about word counts and the like

I feel like I’ve moved into a new level of writing.

There’s nothing concrete to put forth to present this.  But I find that, when I look at stuff I wrote even six months ago, I can see so many places where my writing is weak.  I can step back from it, and – even better – I can see how to fix it.

Undoubtably I’ll be saying the same thing in another six months about what I’m writing now.

This is a good thing.  There’s no point in writing and learning unless you can progress.

How has this come about?  Lots of different things.  Reading a lot – reading critically, especially of books that are popular (and often not considered “good”) is a really important way to learn.  It’s not all about dry technique – we can all point to a book that shows very little actual writing talent, but is loved by the public all the same.  I’ve also been listening to a lot of writing podcasts – namely I Should Be Writing, The Secrets and Writing Excuses.

Finding an awesome group of beta readers who are willing to deconstruct my writing word by word is probably worth more than all of these things combined.  I cannot express how valuable all of my betas are.  Anyone who’s writing in a vacuum – find yourself some first readers.  You won’t regret it.

I learn almost as much betaing for other people, too.  I read or heard recently that we’ll often look for the things in others’ work that we’re actively working on ourselves, which is a really interesting way of looking at it for me.

It’s challenging myself, forcing myself to keep on learning and developing.  And it keeps on going.