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Brian J. W. Lee is a writer. When he's not writing, he's plotting to plunge the world in a deep chasm of terror, darkness and screams. Sorry, did I get carried away?

Tuesday 16 August 2016

Writing Report #2: The Return

This writing report is for yesterday (Tuesday), which is 16/08/2016 (DD/MM/YYYY).

Basically, I've made some edits on my previous short story, which I tentatively name Project Sesame Seeds. 150 words were added to it. Something needs to really be said about my editing style. As a rule, I seem to generally keep adding words where others would work on deleting them. It isn't something to do with the length of the piece either.

Pulau Purba stood at something like 140,000 words. After 7 rounds of editing, it is now over 150,000 words. Project Sesame Seeds went from just over 5,000 to maybe 5,500 or slightly above.

Have no fear though! Just recently, and by that I meant in something like a month or two ago, I identified a whole chunk of superfluous prose and deleted them on Pulau Purba, which should amount to about 500 to 700 words, but that's a start.

I need to work on simplifying sentences where and when I can.

The major bulk of my work yesterday went into Project Agoraphobe. Something like over 1,000 words. This short story is easy to do when it comes to churning out volumes. The story is set in a 22nd century Singapore, so there's a lot of world building - And world building comes easy when it is grounded in reality, even if that reality is over a century behind in 'history'.

In other words, I have surpassed my 1,000 words per day rule. I am back into the game, yee-hah!

I believe my theory on speed of writing holds merit, as I noticeably slow down when I focus in on my character and her plot. They're like speed bumps, but no, I'm not implying that Reyda, the protagonist, is a hindrance to the dystopian tale. It's necessary to slow down at times.

Not every author believes in writing as fast as you can, looking at the numbers. But even amongst authors who do, quality is still paramount. Just ask their publishers and editors, yeah, they'll know. There's a reason why it's hard to get into trade publishing.

So yes, I'm trying to do the logically impossible - Quality AND Quantity. But I'm sure, we writers are used to impossible ideas. We put them down on the page every time.

P.S: I'll be coming up with posts that aren't writing reports soon.

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