Just one sleep…

Huffkins – Yum

Candice: That’s what someone said to me this morning.  The excitement is brewing in our house, though it’s all about the details:

• There is no 25 chocolate in her calendar so will she get a bigger one from the chocolate tin tomorrow?
• Has Father Christmas remembered her OMG LOL (well no he hasn’t as that was a last-minute entry)
• Can we clear some space for her new toys (me)- reluctance to that one

I’ve kept things simple, there are no presents under our tree so she has no idea what is coming. I’m hoping this will allay a 4am wake up!  Too many exciting things under the tree might cause problems.

This year has been very twisty and turny – or ‘Bumpy’ as the Queen has described her year in her annual speech.  Jobs have come and gone for my family, leaving us wondering exactly what next year will look like.  For now, I’m enjoying my new role and hopefully the same can soon be said for the other half.  Phil’s had a few bumps too, but not on his train tracks.

Normally I write a blog about Christmas Parties this time of year but mine has been very subdued.  Yes, I had a nice night out, good food, a few glasses of Sauvignon, and some good chat but it was all over very early.  Being a project person in a big company, employed people had their own parties to go too so there were too many decisions about which party to go to.  By the sound of lots of friends, this is getting more and more unusual as companies clamp down on spending on the nice stuff like Xmas parties, which I think is a real shame.

Phil and I had a nice meal the other day and exchanged presents.  We are both of the school that presents take precedence and like the excitement of buying something that we think someone will like.  I’m almost as excited as Erin about opening mine tomorrow!

Hope that all our readers have a great Christmas and look forward to some good reading and writing experiences in the new year.

MERRY CHRISTMAS (in a Noddy Holder stylie)

 

 

Why I’m not getting anything done.

Phil: I’m busy. Very busy. But still, I don’t seem to get as much done as I think I should.

Fortunately, there is a word for that.

Ploiter – To work in an entirely ineffectual way, because your mind is simply not on the job.

That’s me. Too tired after a busy weekend. Brain fugg because there are so many things to do and I keep jumping from one to another.

All of which leads to,

Quiddling – Busying oneself with trivial tasks in order to avoid the important ones.

I blame the dopamine. That little hit you get when finding out something new, or achieving something really trivial. Yes, I know I’ll feel much better if I do something big, but my stupid brain doesn’t get it.

Still, back to work…

(Words from Susie Dent’s entertaining Twitter feed)

The value of an editor

Phil: I’m still working on the edits I mentioned last week.

Most evenings, after watching Space 1999, I settle down for an hour of approving, or not, corrections to our text.

The vast majority are punctuation. Spotting the red edit text and then zapping it with a right click of my mouse is an interesting game which demands pinpoint accuracy. Watching the little bars on the right-hand side getting smaller and then vanishing is satisfying. Once they are gone, I’ve got all the changes.

There’s a bit of text shuffling and tightening too. I don’t always agree to these changes, there are a (very) few occasions when I prefer our style and since it’s subjective, I let us win. Mostly, to be fair, the excellent Catherine is right and the story flows better for her efforts.

We’ve a few plot points to deal with, and I’ve sorted out a slot in the busy Nolan festive diary for us to go through these. I think she’s doing overtime in Santa’s workshop or something as shes very busy.

A few times though, I’ve read the text and thought, “How the heck did we let that one get through?” or even “How the heck did we write that in the first place?” Frustrating, but now these boo-boos are getting sorted.

The whole process is a bit like having your work marked by a teacher. I suspect everyone hopes their text is perfect, and no-ones ever is, but I can’t help feeling that “Must try harder” could be written at the bottom of this. I’m sure we were slicker when Kate vs the Navy was proofed.

What I do see is how all the work is making a better book. When you start to write, people go on about the importance of an editor, but it’s a bill no-one wants to think about if they are honest. The more I look at the plot tweaks and inconsistences picked up, I know we’ve spent our money well. Yes, we should have got most of them ourselves, and many people won’t spot the changes, but every one makes our story a more enjoyable read. Talking of which, I end up reading it too and it’s still a good story.

Anyway, I’ll continue plugging away. I’ve another part of the routine – claiming the days chocolate from my advent calendar only when I’ve done my homework. Everyone needs some motivation!

Back to work under the gaze of Mariah Carey

Phil: Regular readers will be pleased to know there were no fights in team NolanParker last week in Birmingham last week.

No, we met up in the Museum cafe and enjoyed some excellent tea, cake and chat. As Candice said last week, our problem is that we have more projects than time and this means none of them is making any headway. We need to focus on one, get it down and then move on to another.

First, we focused on eating cake – result – cake was eaten. Well done us!

Next, there was a look at our writing ambitions.

We’ve got 2 books out and a third half-written. But, and it’s a big but, we’ve never been entirely happy with the first one. There’s nothing really wrong with it, the story and jokes are excellent, but it didn’t seem like a finished and polished package.

Kate vs the Navy benefitted from a proper proof-reading. Kate vs the Dirtboffins was proofread, but not nearly as well. Some things you just have to pay for, instead we relied on our (then) publisher.

So, Book 1 has been sent off for proofing and we received the results a couple of weeks ago. As ever, Catherine has done a superb job. We learned a lot about our own book from the list of characters and locations in the accompanying notes. She also complimented up on some aspects of our writing.

But, this still leaves a huge number of changes to be looked at from tiny punctuation marks to sentence tweaks to pick up the pace. Someone has to go through these and I volunteered that someone better be me.

So, last Saturday I grabbed a seat in my local library. Candice being unavailable to supervise me, Mariah Carey stood in for her.  You’d never know them apart except that MK is older. And on a bag of crips. (No, I don’t know why)

I thought a good day we see this done. It wouldn’t, Katherine has been far too thorough. 6 hours and a second location with cake later, I’m only at chapter 10. That’s about 1/3 of the way through the book. After that, I’ll be left with the bigger changes that will need the full team to discuss.