Writing: December 2015 Archives

I can't remember a time when, as an adult, I regularly watched TV news. In the days before the internet, there were times when I got and read newspapers: the excellent Edmonton Journal in its heyday, The Globe and Mail, and the Sunday edition of the New York Times. But most of my news, in the nineties, came from CBC Radio One. They do regional, national and international series daily. Their coverage was balanced and interesting, their journalists are brilliant, and the people they got to do interviews had legit expertise in whatever they were being asked about. None of these were gimmes, even then, and it was all nicely curated and informative. It gave me that feeling I used to seek from the news, that of being connected to global goings-on.

All of that changed overnight, pretty much, on September 11, 2001.

^^^Hello. M Harold Page here again! Swordsman. Author. Edinburgh literary type (as long as by literary you mean "pertaining to books in which time travelling communist tanks battle magic-using knights...")

And it's December, so let's assume you've finished your NaNoWriMo novel with the help of that previous post of mine.

Now what are you going to do with it?

Please don't just bin it!

There's a lot of macho advice out there, and you have to write your "gazillion words" of crap and all. And you may feel you've spewed worse than crap onto your word-processor screen. Flaunting your angst may also seem like less hard work than fixing your book.

But, you were buzzed enough about the idea to spend a month on it, so calm down a little and consider doing the following...