draft zero Archives - RKB Writes

[Plotting About:] Where Weavers Daire, Second Draft . . .

Published by R. K. Bentley on September 18, 2014

Once I finished the first draft of Where Weavers Daire and uploaded it to the writing group, some 3 weeks late after my promised deadline, I came off my victory lap and woke up the next morning with poster’s remorse.
Remorse because the first draft of anything is shit.
And boy did I see how I should’ve eliminated things and introduced characters sooner and and and and I need a better ending, now, I’m going to have to gut a lot of the 147k behemoth into something readable and enjoyable.
Which is a good thing since It’s 47k words over my imposed ceiling.
This is where my alpha readers and writing group comes in to tell me characters sound the same and why is everyone acting normal?
If you don’t have alpha/beta readers to critique your work it’s time to find some…legally. Don’t hunt people down for sport only to ask them to read the next great masterpiece, it doesn’t work like that.
I’ve been using Google Drive for editing so having the iPad open to scroll through the edits and the laptop open to go line by horrible line.
I’m glad I decided not to push this to the limit and try and get it edited and published through Createspace. It would’ve been waste of time and money.
I have started to collect names of agents that cover sci-fi and once I get done with the second or third draft I’ll think about querying.
Better to put my best foot forward than slip across the floor on a banana peel of misspellings and heinous plot lines that go nowhere.

[Plotting About] August 2014 / Week 1 / Where Weavers Daire / Chapter 31

Published by R. K. Bentley on August 8, 2014

Welcome to August.
Welcome to the one year anniversary of me going freelance.
Welcome to the end of Chapter Thirty, the last chapter I had written in 2013 before figuring out: Well, shit, I guess I’ll go back and re-write the first third so it makes sense.
It gets squishy from here even if I’ve written the last chapter already.
Okay so I lie a little bit about squishy part.
I foresee passing the 120k ceiling for this first draft. Revisions will probably bring that down to a normal level.
And I’m submitting it in it’s entirely to the writing group in a week.
No pressure.
That brings the Where Weavers Daire K BAR count to:

[Plotting About] March 2014 / Week 3 / Weaver / Chapter 11

Published by R. K. Bentley on March 21, 2014

(h/t to Jen Basile for posting the icon)
My unofficial deadline for Weaver was yesterday.
But as you can see from the count o’meter we’re getting close to the 1/3 mark.
The Where Weavers Daire K BAR count is:

Chapter 11 and onward is good news since the chapters are already written.
Chapter 12 is getting a slight re-write but otherwise it’ll be subtle tweaks from here on in.
Went to a meeting of the Association of Rhode Island Authors. Was nice to do some networking.
Anyone listening to my social feeds next week will see an uptick in pictures and posts from Emerald City Comic Con, Seattle and a lovely four legged golden named Clover.
The East Coast getting one more snow storm before I leave feels like Nelson Muntz laughing. Damn you, Smarch weather.
I decided to cosplay as Jayne Cobb this year. It’s easier than Mal Reynolds since there is less to ship. 🙂
Thankfully the Jayne pistol made by QE Props fits into my Mal holster.
One of the essential items was finished up by my mom:

At this rate I may need to wear it to the airport…

[Plotting About] September's Metrics or Cresting 100k or NaNoWrimo is one and half months away…

Published by R. K. Bentley on September 13, 2013

Yeh, I need to start making my own You Should be Writing icons. Thanks to Tumblr for the above image and several more.
A quick local shout out to Jen Butler Basile’s Chopping Potatoes and Bennett North’s blog.
Both blogs are fun to read with Jen’s covering motherhood with fun pictures and Bennett’s posts on ranging from movie reviews to ongoing SF&F and geek politics.
Novel Update:
The Where Weavers Daire K BAR count is:

After my last update, I went back and took an entire chapter out because it broke with my stay with one of the protagonist for three chapters plan and got rid of two chapters because they went in the wrong direction.
The goods news is scenes from three of those chapters are savable and shuffled.
And then I found out my first nine chapters had been formatted with 1.5 spacing and not double as the other chapters were. My 14-15 page max rule for chapters kinda went out the window but that’s what editing is there for.
Formatting may be as boring as all get out but I like to get it down before I start writing. This is why I created a template in Word to cover all the margins, spacing and indenting without using the tab key.
Cresting the 100k hill felt good even if I had bounced back and forth over the line by adding/subtracting chapters to get to where I am now. I can see the end which I already wrote so it’s just the knock down drag out fight between Spencer and the villain.
I also raised the cut off ceiling to 120k. The agents at the panel I went to at SDCC said don’t worry about the word count and just write it. Half of that advice was already echoed by the writing group.
NaNoWrimo Update:
With 2.5 months to go before NaNoWrimo, I decided not to re-up for municipal liaison duties.
As much as I enjoy trying to coordinate I don’t know what I’ll be doing in November and I’d rather commit than quit a week before hand. My plans are to plot out Book Two of Weaver before going into November and be done with Book One of Weaver by the end of September.
Convention Update:
Yeh, the SDCC pictures aren’t getting tweaked until the novel is finished. I have a list of people I bought stuff from that I want to pass on. That’ll be in the future post.
Emerald City Comic Con tickets have gone up sale. In line with prices from last year, if no one has been to Seattle it’s a great con to go to. Nice people. Good amount of venders and the guests they have lined up is growing.
They’ve extended the con to all of Friday and will be mailing out badges this year. That sound you heard was everyone who stood in line for two hours this year breathing a sigh of relief.
They haven’t taken the extra step of incorporating RFID into the badges like NYCC has but one can assume that’s on the horizon.
New Television Season:
I’ll post some television ramblin’ later since the new season starts next week…

[Plotting About] June's Metrics and ramblin'…

Published by R. K. Bentley on June 17, 2012

So with June halfway gone and July soon approaching, the metrics look like this:
The WIP K BAR count is:

The Rhody Writing Group unanimously said: Yeh, we need info dump, new characters are too much and the other things that made great sense.
So, Chapter 9 gets a re-write, again and probably 10 as well.
The Clarion Write-A-Thon begins next week. I decided to participate to see if it’ll help get through these chapters. The Write-A-Thon coincides with the Clarion Sci-Fi & Fantasy Workshop. My writer’s profile page is here.

And, for some reason there’s a Clarion West Write-A-Thon which makes this even odder.
The Gotham Writing On-Line Workshop for Sci-Fi and Fantasy has my eye. The June class is full but I’m looking at the August on-line class.
In other news, the Quonset Airshow had a good weekend. I went in late on Saturday and starting using my new 70mm-200mm IS L Lens and have to say with some practice it’s well worth the money spent. The only downside is swapping lens when I get closer to objects and after looking at some of the other L lens on cameras around me, I have to say some people dropped 2k+ for the 28-300 L IS. I posted a few photos to my Facebook timeline, I’ll be post the rest to Flickr shortly.
The Airshow as a whole has gotten better even if the planes on static display are disappearing only to replaced by food carts and climbing walls for the kids. The aerial displays were fun to watch I enjoyed the T-6’s the most since they weren’t tiny aerobatic planes. No offense to those aerobatic acts it’s just: I like heritage fly overs, I like different acts, refueling by big jets and maybe even the occasional sail plane. The jet truck and combined arms demo is fun to watch but give me something else that doesn’t include a soundtrack that drops from rock to Star Wars to Battlestar Galactica.
The Portsmouth-Boston Airshow in 2 weeks looks divine, unfortunately, I’m busy. Judging from the acts, I strongly recommend going.
On the tech front, I decided to take the plunge and get a retina Mac Book Pro. It should be arriving just in time for vacation in July. The biggest reason for buying it: the iPad just didn’t have the word processor functionality I needed. It’s to the ebook functionality and the web browsing portability. There are some great word processing apps don’t get me wrong but my work flow switching back and forth between app and Word. That and just pulling out the laptop from my bag instead of the iPad mount and keyboard will be nice.
Quick writing links: Pixar Story Rules.
Looking ahead to November, dunno if I’m going to be ML for NaNoWrimo. Figure I’ll decide while I’m break in July and if I decide to take a step back notify everyone.

[Plotting About] Deathbar's college roommate…

Published by R. K. Bentley on June 14, 2011

Chapter 5 done.
Chapter 6 in progress.

[Plotting About] Editing and writing groups…

Published by R. K. Bentley on March 20, 2011

The current work in progress went through a few revisions recently all thanks to feedback from writing groups.
Feedback from someone not related to you is worth it’s weight in gold. It can also be a nice ego boost when 1/3 of the group are not avid sci-fi readers but enjoyed the story and found it easy to read.
Sure, it means more revising but revising is good too since the first draft of anything will always suck. Look no further than Transformers 2 or in my case the first two chapters of my work in progress.
The first chapter worked, the second chapter sucked. So out went the second chapter, I kept the first, moved it and after feedback about what the hell was going on I tried to explain what happened before but that sucked due to too much exposition. Another chapter one was started and it felt right. Example: A family of Salvage Operators find our protagonist and it leads to chapter 2 and so on.
More feedback came in about the space aged nuclear family of 4 let’s call them the Reynolds for now, why not drop Mister Reynolds and let Missus Reynolds lead the family instead. So, slicing off the fat off your prized baby is a good thing.
Now, I have five print outs to go through to check for grammar also a good thing since I suck at that and hopefully the other reviewers don’t.
I also have Chapter 3 to worry about since sorta starting to suck too.
So, over all, I’ve had a good experience with all this and I highly recommend finding a group if you’re looking for feedback since they will give it to you.
If you are looking for a writing group, I’d recommend checking meetup.com first, they have their act together.

[Plotting About] Stellar Cartography and you…

Published by R. K. Bentley on March 5, 2011

One of the questions that the writing workshop was how did I envision the world: Easy Sci-Fi, Medium or Hard Sci-Fi?
Now in my mind it goes like this:
Stupid, Easy, Medium and Hard. Stupid being the current incarnation of V. Easy being Farscape, Firefly, Star Wars, Fifth Element. Medium-ish-sorta being Alien/Aliens and Hard being 2001.
I decided to go with medium. Medium to me is: No sound in space, no Star Trek inertial dampeners, Alien/Firefly lived in ships and trying to stay away from Hyperspace/Warp/Light/Ludicrous Speed as much as possible.
So, I scribbled some notes and decided to break open Illustrator and start on a “map”.