By Mat | Published:
July 26, 2005
There’s a kind of archaeology in the editing process. Having finished a rough first draft of The Last Monk about three weeks ago, I’ve spent much of the intervening time reading and re-reading the entire manuscript, picking out everything from typos and bad grammar, through inelegant sentence structure to the high-end narrative and character lines which should drive the book.
By Mat | Published:
June 30, 2005
Due to recent advances, I can now reveal the first and last line of The Last Monk. It begins with ‘The house is suddenly filled with music’, and ends with the words ‘small, green plastic frogs’.
It’s a philosophical piece, obviously.
By Mat | Published:
June 19, 2005
I’ve spent much of the last three weeks informing the reader (also the spouse, the neighbour and the teen-aged sales assistant at J.B. HiFi) of my revelation that before I could type a single word of the grand climax of The Last Monk, time would be required to percolate, to mull, and generally to walk around parks scowling at ducks in the vain hope that someone would ask me what I was looking so thoughtful about.
Quite a bit of time, I thought. About a fortnight.
As it happens, it took about six hours.
By Mat | Published:
June 1, 2005
I did some quick sums a couple of days ago and realised that my final act is now seventy pages long, and I haven’t even got to the really exciting bit yet.
This gave me an excuse to do something I’ve always enjoyed, which is editing in widescreen. Because there’s a lot of material, and the changes I anticipated would most likely involve shuffling big chunks of text around, the best way to do it is to print the whole thing out, spread it out on the floor and scan it from a distance to let the large-scale structures reveal themselves.
Here then is what my living room floor looked like this morning:
