Today was a much better day than yesterday. A bit of better luck in research, a couple of good ideas. and suddenly this thing is almost good to go! Almost, but not quite. Still need a couple of backups and a stronger source for one of the entries. Chugging along…

Today was not a successful evening for writing. Rewriting of one pitch has stalled due to lack of inspiration/material, second pitch has also been knocked back for rewrite, novel sitting at 50%…bah. If I don’t get any decent stuff for the articles tomorrow I may have to resort to film reviews to fill my scribbling quota.

I’m hoping so! It’s definitely coming together a lot better so far, the only real issue is finding material. Research-digging tomorrow, I think.

Now I need to go and rewrite the first one based on editorial feedback. I do feel better about this second one though – could definitely go places!

Today I checked on my second pitch for Cracked, and it was 500 words too long. This meant rewriting it, which has somehow translated to turning it from six entries into ten. Not sure how that works.

Or rather, trying to – I’ve finished the sample entry, but I still need to find sources for the other entries and the backups. Plus a possible attempt to make the whole thing a bit funnier.

Today’s scribbling consisted mostly of more research and writing for my second Cracked pitch. It’s a pretty hefty piece of work – I’m still working on the sample entry, and it’s big enough that this may be only a four-item list to stay under the wordcount. In other news, my first pitch got knocked back for another rewrite (too zany), so I may pull out the sample from that and stick it up here for you over the weekend while I rewrite it.

One thing I learned from my first Cracked pitch is that they are absolute demons for accuracy and sources. So currently I am going through my pitch researching it pretty much paragraph by paragraph. The fun of this is that the sources have to be online so they can be verified, and have to be snappy enough that they can be quoted. It’s a lot of fun though – I really enjoy digging these things out.

Today I added another couple of bumpers to the chapters, and I also corrected an error I had made in an earlier chapter. Turns out that in almost all commonwealth countries, the Vice Chancellor of a university is the actual head, while in the USA the Chancellor is usually the actual head. I had thought that the Vice Chancellor being in charge at my old university was a unique peculiarity. Good to know.

So I’ve decided to rename my novel, and to update the structure of it slightly to try to create a theme. This consists, so far, of adding “bumpers” to the beginning of each of the chapters. I’m doing this for the 14 chapters I’ve rewritten so far (not counting the one I dismembered and spread around), and have done five of them, with ideas for three or four of the upcoming chapters as well.