I just did some­thing com­pletely ran­dom, I cre­ated and ordered a first draft book of And The Stars Ran Red through Lulu. Whilst tak­ing in my daily fix of blog posts and site updates, I came across Adam Christopher’s post about edit­ing and the idea seemed bril­liant. Why didn’t I ever think of that!? …I said to myself.

I’ve been putting off hav­ing my man­u­script printed off in any form, sim­ply because I’m get­ting more and more bogged down in the idea that it blows (and as my first novel, it likely shows more of my weak­nesses than my strengths). So, when I read about Adam’s idea, I thought it a per­fect solu­tion — I can carry it around in my bag, I can edit it at work with­out hav­ing to slam down a hug pile of papers on my manager’s desk, and I will have it right there, star­ing at me, and not hid­den away in some folder on my com­puter. Any­way, it’s ordered and on its way, so we’ll see how it goes.

In other com­pletely non-news, I recently picked up Orson Scott Card’s How To Write Sci­ence Fic­tion & Fan­tasy. I wanted to grab a book because I’m hav­ing trou­bles plan­ning my sto­ries out these days, and I think being a ‘pantster’ is curs­ing me a lit­tle. In an effort to… what’s that word… eh… PLAN a bit more, I thought a lit­tle advice would be help­ful. I can­not stand those self-help kinds of books though, the type of text­book that teaches you in X amount of steps, you can achieve blah blah blah — I don’t want a stack of direc­tions and ‘Writ­ing for Idiots’ books beside me, besides which I think I have some sem­blance of tal­ent and I’m not com­pletely clue­less. This one though, well it looked nice and even bet­ter, it’s nice inside too. Bro­ken into few sec­tions, it goes over the basics as well as (what I needed) world build­ing thoughts and feel­ings, and a strong approach to fig­ur­ing out all those bonkers ideas in my head.

It’s been pretty help­ful, as in under 24 hours it’s already got me think­ing and think­ing. Actu­ally fig­ur­ing out things that were star­ing me in the face through­out these sto­ries I have, such as motives and choices, char­ac­ter types, and an issue that plagues Sci-Fi every now and then, expo­si­tion dumps. Namely, how to avoid them.

Hope­fully, on the back of me launch­ing May 5 & The Assas­sin, and now these acts of self-motivation and dis­ci­pline, I can con­tinue the begin­ning of 2011 with as much enthu­si­asm for my own writ­ing. Own Worst enemy, who me? Pff…