Blog Post No. 524
I sure hope I’m not going to be shooting myself in the foot (since I write my posts before their Thursday release) but if things go according to my current schedule, I should be done this draft of the Invasion Novel by tomorrow. I’m calling it the sixth draft even though I’ve been through the book more than six times. I feel like this is the sixth version of the book, though, so I’m sticking with it. While I’m optimistic that I’ll be finished, there is one potential issue that could make me a liar.
If you thought I was done talking about the Invasion Novel just because I finished it (and maybe suggested that I wouldn’t be talking about it as much) you were dead wrong. I’ve just been in a holding pattern waiting for Christian to wrap up the first review of the chunky book and working on short stories in the interim. (I’m just finishing off the last one that I had started since I’d like to submit it for a collection at the end of the month).
My first love of books came from reading Philip K. Dick short stories in high school. I loved the creative ideas and the tight prose. I had an idea that I wanted to tell stories before discovering those collections, but after reading them, I started to see the possibility of becoming a writer.
As I get older, the weeks go by faster and faster. It’s a common phenomenon that was shaken up by the nearly two-year-long shutdown. During that odd period, time lost some of its meaning. The months would blink by, but the days would sometimes drag. The temporary change seemed to soften the edge of the speedy weeks in exchange for a potentially worst manipulation of time.
With Snow at the printer and out of my hands, it’s time to dive back into the Invasion Novel.
It’s the last update of the year. Probably. I still have two weeks left and who know what I’m going to dig up to talk about. I have the 2021 preview post to do, so that means it’s next week’s topic that’s still to be determined. As far as updates go, though, this one is going to be mostly about Break/Interrupt. 
October is coming to an end and while I’ve stumbled with the edits on Break/Interrupt, I finally feel like I’ve made some headway. I’m still behind (a state that I unfortunately fallen into way too often) but with some elbow grease, I may be starting the second draft on November first. Maybe it will be my not NaNoWriMo project. 
I’m going to try again. Last week, I meant to write a post about the way I do some of my writing. I had been chatting with a friend about what we were both working on and how we’re handling it. I happened to be racing to finish the third draft of 
I feel like I’m still fairly new to writing. I suppose that’s all relative. Lately I’ve been spending more time with writers who have more experience than I do. It seems, compared to them, I am but a spring chicken. I have been working on writing for a while, and I have gleaned some insights. I’m not one to write a lot of how-to or writing guides on this blog, but I’m in the middle of the second draft of the collection and some thoughts have come to mind, specifically about second drafts. Strangely, I feel that my place in writing (as in the skill and act) is sort of like a second draft. I started by just writing. I had ideas for stories and I sat down and wrote them in a way that made sense to me (and seemed fairly entertaining). Later, through perseverance and growth (and by steeling the knowledge of others) I started to find the faults in my writing. Since then I’ve been working to eliminate them, at the cost of my voice. It’s an important step, though a bland one. 
Ben Van Dongen 