An Unfortunate Tweet

Camp Nano has been one heck of a journey for me this year. Normally, my editing takes the process of reading my book, assembling it in the correct order, and editing page by page from there. However, when I was working with my new editor on my last book, I found a new way. I went over the book and wrote what each chapter was, put them on post-it notes and stuck them inside my notebook while I played around with it. It helped me to really see where I was missing plot points and make sweeping changes if needed from a top-down approach that my old way of working wouldn't have allowed. I decided to see if it helped me with editing this next book. 

I should start by saying I knew it had problems. I was expecting a lot of rewrites. However, I was not expecting this method to show me that my entire plot was wrong and needed to be rewritten essentially. And I'm only exaggerating a little when I say that. I just finished the top-down overview and I have 17 chapters that are listed as "rewrite from scratch"... there could be more by the end of this pass, but that's what I'm working with now. 

Despite that daunting number, I'm actually pretty hopeful. Fox's Facade was a really difficult book to write in the first place. It was going a few different places, but at the time, I don't think I was a good enough writer to anticipate what exactly it would need. Regardless of the actual reason, I think the way I have restructured the plot will work a lot better now. I began rewrites a few days ago. Hopefully, it won't take me too long to do them. I'd like to have the edits out to my beta readers by September, if possible, though I'll have to see how my editing is going before I set that as the goal. 

That finished, I'd like to talk about a tweet that was posted earlier this week. 

This tweet from @dntmakeitworse to be exact. If you've read my blog for any amount of time, I'm sure you know how false this is. Yes, women tend to be overlooked in publishing. I'm not saying that isn't a problem. I've read the story all too many times about fans walking up to female authors and thanking them for writing under a pseudonym or their initials. "I never would have picked up your book if I'd known a woman wrote it" is something that all too many have heard. 

That said, while I think this was what the tweeter was trying to convey, they are horribly wrong. Even leaving aside solid staples such as Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Anne McCaffery, and Agatha Christie, there are hundreds of others. Margaret Atwood, Harper Lee, Ursula K. LeGuin, Baroness Orczy... this isn't even counting that the first novel in the world was written by a woman; my personal hero of Murasaki Shikibu, the lady-in-waiting who wrote The Tale of Genji. 

If you think women haven't always been there, doing the same things men were, you are sorely mistaken. Our tale often isn't told; the women warriors of Shaka Zulu's armies, the female samurai of Japan, the women of Scotland trained to defend the homestead when the men were away. 

And that I think is where I'll end it today. Let me know who your favorite female author as a kid was. Personally, I will also hold a place in my heart for Anne McCaffery. I loved her story of psychics, dragons, and cats.