Happy Friday! And thank goodness for the first weekend of summer 😎

As you can see from the title, I’ve decided to swap out Keeping Score for Writing Circle for these updates. I think the latter is closer to what I want these to be, for several reasons:

• It implies a circle of trust, which is what we build when we write; we invite the reader into our circle of trust, because when we write we’re vulnerable, in ways we can’t always see at the time.
• The writing process itself is a circle: idea, draft, edit, new idea, new draft, new edits. There’s no real beginning or end, only calling time on a current project.
• As we travel on a circle (working on a project), the idea of “winning” or racing doesn’t really make sense. There’s no where to go, really, other than forward, no destination to arrive at where we can compare ourselves (favourably or unfavourably) to others.
• A circle is bounded, which (hopefully) will keep us from wandering too far astray.

With the last point in mind, I think I want to start exploring a different aspect of writing each week. Share something I’ve learned from other writers, in the hopes that it’s helpful to someone else. Small tricks of the trade, if you will. I’ve got ideas for the first few (starting next week), but if there’s something you’d like to discuss, let me know!

As for my own projects, I did manage to wrap up the second round of novel edits last weekend 🎉✍️

So now it’s on to the stickier bits. The relationships I didn’t properly flesh out before and the background characters that exist as little more than a name right now (if even that). For those, I’ve just been brainstorming this week: Opening my notebook to a fresh page, writing a question at the top, and then listing out all the different possible answers I can think of in fifteen minutes. Yes, I do set a timer, and yes I do make myself keep jotting down progressively silly ideas until the time is up 😊

This weekend I’ll make time to go back through all of those, pick out the ones I like best, and then start planning how to work them into the story. I’m hoping to make more targeted edits this time, adding these new parts of the story as extra scenes or flashbacks or dialog where appropriate, instead of having to read the whole thing through again.

That’s the plan, anyway. We’ll see if it works 🤞

Switching out the naming convention here. Keeping Score hasn’t really applied for some time now; I don’t track words written so much as chapters or scenes completed, and even then I’m aiming for time at the keyboard more than anything else.

And the old name is starting to feel a little too competitive, for me. A little too much like I’m trying to outpace myself or other writers, when really I just want to remind myself every once in a while of how far I’ve come, and maybe — if I’m lucky — give some comfort to my fellow writers, full-time or part-time, that are struggling.

That said, I haven’t settled on a new name/theme just yet. Going with Writing Update for now, which is very on the nose, but will do for a first draft. ✍️

Speaking of drafts, I’m almost done with the second-run edits of the sci-fi novel. Fingers crossed I might actually wrap those up this weekend!

Word count is holding steady at just over 87k, though I think next I’ll tackle the missing scenes, and fill in some plot holes, which’ll bump that up a bit. Ditto the fleshing out of some background characters I need to do. Hard for readers to get attached to folks that just pop in and out of the narrative.

And that’ll probably take me through the end of the month, if not longer. Still, once this second round is done, then the book-wide edits are basically finished. The rest will be more targeted changes, so I won’t have to keep going through the whole draft every time. At least, that’s what I hope 🤞

How about you? Where are you at, in your own projects?

In 2018, I’d filed near-identical FOI requests to each of Canada’s 14 federal, provincial and territorial prison agencies asking for data from their correctional databases. I figured there might be interesting stories hidden there, particularly in the relationships between peoples’ sentence lengths, age, sex and race…What ensued was a detailed discussion [between provincial ministries] about how to block me from getting what I wanted.

A damning indictment of the current Freedom of Information process in Canada.

The whole Secret Canada project is fine reporting, and well worth your time. I wanted to highlight the above story, though, because it’s so personal. Also the surprising fact that Alberta denied every FOI request The Globe and Mail made as part of the project, the only province to do so.

Apologies for the long gap between these. I swear I’ve been working on the novel (well, off and on), but with a new gig and a schedule shift my usual morning routine has been a bit disrupted 😅

In any case, the novel edits continue. I’m about two-thirds of the way through the second major round of edits. I know, slow pace, but a chapter or two a day (on good days) is about all I can handle right now. Still, I tell myself, if I have an edited novel by the end of the year, that’s fantastic. No deadlines.

And the book’s still growing, as I edit. It’s pushing 88,000 words atm, after starting out at around 79k. And I haven’t yet added the missing scenes that the critique group uncovered. So might still end up somewhere north of 90k, which is on the long end, I think, for a thriller of this type, but that’ll probably come down again if I sell it and it goes through the full editing process 🤞

Meanwhile, I needed something to submit to the critique group, so we’ve been working through my third novel, an urban fantasy where the main character is a lawyer working for a modern-day Titania and her Faerie Court. That one’s even shorter than the sci-fi book, so we’re already halfway through the first draft (!). It is a first draft, though, so there’s a lot of work to do on that one.

Reading that book again (with the group) has been…a bit of a trip. It was written long enough ago that the idea of using a camera (instead of your phone) to take pictures for evidence wasn’t strange, and it contains a character that I wanted to read as non-binary before I really knew any folks that identified as such (or had done any reading on their experiences). So I’m editing it as I post each section, re-working things on the fly to catch up to current events (and my current understanding).

Yet I realize I’m still in love with the book, and its characters, even after all this time. I’m glad the group’s been willing to dive into it with me (it being a very rough draft), because it’s given me hope that it, too, can be edited into a shape suitable for publication.

Who knows? With some luck (and a lot of elbow grease) I might finish the year with two novels ready to go. ✍️

The company had also started changing the credit cards for all of its monthly recurring bills, as they’d max out one card and move on to the next card. Occasionally, a bill would slip through the cracks and a specific service would get shut off. Come January, Brydge’s internet access got cut off for an unpaid bill, a former employee said. Brydge ultimately asked an employee to put their credit card on the internet bill, promising to pay them back later.

9to5mac.com/2023/05/0…

Just…Wow. My heart goes out to Brydge’s former employees. Sounds like they’ve been carrying the company financially for a while, all while their CEOs were BSing them about the true state of things 💔

Some shots from a hike I took last week, when we got our first peek at sunny spring weather here in Victoria, BC:

Looking west from Wharf St, just south of the Johnson St bridge.

And here’s the view looking south, at the Parliament Building.

This one’s from along the coast, looking out at the distant mountains, near the breakwater at Ogden Point.

And a shot along Dallas Road, heading east and south, with the Olympic Mountains in the distance.

Now on the coastal walkway along Dallas, peeking over a grassy hillock at the mountains and sea.

Little cove along the coast, looking back west and south from the walkway.

Coming up on Clover Point now — a popular spot for kites in the spring — with driftwood lining the beach below.

Heading back home, spotted some cherry blossoms lining the streets in Fairfield, announcing Spring is here!

Seeing a lot of fear-mongering on Canada’s Bill C-18, which will require companies like Google and Facebook to actually pay newspapers for copying their articles into their services. People are calling it a link tax, saying it will lead to the End of the Open Web. How could such a “bad bill” make it so far?

Simply put: Because it doesn’t actually do any of the things these panicked people claim it will.

Here, go read the executive summary of the bill yourself. Far from being a “link tax,” it’s a — belated — intervention of the Canadian government into a market in the public interest.

Basically, Google and Facebook don’t just link to work produced by others anymore; they’ll copy it and present it on their own websites. They defend this as something done for the benefit of users, a convenience, but really it’s so users — you and I — won’t leave their sites. The longer we stay on their pages, the more ads we’ll see, and the more money they collect.

What’s wrong with that? Well, those ads used to be sold on the websites of the people writing those articles — newspapers, magazines, blogs — and so the revenue used to flow directly to those people. The creators. Now that money flows to Google and Facebook, who are getting rewarded for what is basically theft. And that’s one reason — among many, sure, but an important one — why so many news orgs across North America have gone belly up in the last decade and a half.

So Bill C-18 is an attempt to redress that theft, by requiring large search engine companies to enter into a contract with news orgs — or groups of individual news generators — to compensate them for the work they would otherwise take for free.

It’s not even that innovative a bill! It’s based on one Australia passed in 2021. Prior to that bill passing, I saw the same fear-mongering and breathless doom and gloom announcements about the “end” of the Open Web. Facebook and Google also pulled the same childish stunts, cutting off news access for Australians prior to the bill’s passing.

So it passed, and did Australia suddenly become a barren internet wasteland? Ha, no. Facebook and Google obeyed the law, cut deals with 30 different media companies, who raked in millions of additional revenue — revenue that will be used to pay journalists — as a result. Meanwhile, the doom-and-gloom gang have moved on, to beating the same tired drums about Canada’s bill.

They were wrong about Australia’s law. They’re wrong about Canada’s.

For a bit more background on the Australian law, and Facebook’s history of bad behaviour, check out this piece by anti-monopolist Matt Stoller.

Happy St Patrick’s Day! To celebrate, here’s a shot I took while on a walk yesterday, of a tree that has decided, equinox or no equinox, it is Spring, dammit:

Also worth celebrating: I’m almost done with the first round of novel edits ✍️🎉

Only two chapters left to go! I’m aiming to get those wrapped up this weekend. Then plan out the next batch of changes. The book’s grown to 86,000 words now; I’m thinking it might top out at 90k when all these edits are done.

So what’s left to do? In no particular order:

• Add three more scenes, one that I completely forgot to write (but wrote like I’d already written it) and two that came up in feedback as needed to explain an antagonist’s actions
• Completely revise the MacGuffin subplot to make it more believable and explained in greater detail
• Rip out one of the twists, because there’s only so much far-flung tech you can shove in an otherwise “grounded” story before it breaks
• Deepen the characterization for another one of the antagonists
• Patch a couple plot holes
• Fill out character physical descriptions, add more details to their thought processes, etc

…ok, seeing it all typed out like that is a little intimidating 😅 Thank goodness I’m not working to any external deadline!

Still, I intend to get through these edits by the summer, and be down to final line edits and getting feedback from beta readers. With a bit of luck 🍀, I’ll be ready to submit it to agents (well, to query agents about it) by the end of the year.

How about you? As we head into Spring, how are your own writing goals coming along?

Happy Friday! It’s the end of my first full week at the new job. It’s also the first week where I’ve been able to work on the novel every day after work.

Those first few weeks were like resuming an exercise routine in January after taking the holidays off. In a word: rough 😅 Each day was good , mind you — the team I’ve joined is a great one, and the work’s interesting — but being slightly out of practice meant I finished each one ready to sink into my comfy chair and turn my brain off for a good while.

This week I turned the corner. I’ve been finishing out the day with more energy, enough so that I can carve out an hour (or two) after dinner to work on the novel edits. After dinner being the very important thing there; having dinner first (and watching/reading something) gives me some mental space from work, and a physical boost to let me focus on the words without rushing.

As a result, I’m now two-thirds of the way through these edits. The novel’s grown from 79K words to 85K and counting 😳 At this rate, I might end up with less of a 60s-style short novel and more of a regular 21st century tome. Which is great! It’s like I’ve discovered a whole section of my book that was missing, and am gradually adding it back in.

All thanks to the critique group, of course. They’ve been simply incredible with their patience and their feedback, pushing on to keep reading even in the face of missing physical descriptions, missing setting info, even missing scenes!

I hope wherever you are, you’ve found a group of writers to help and support you in your work (and that you support them in turn). It’s a lonely art we practice; fellow travellers are a must 😊