Thursday, May 05, 2011

Thursday Thoughts

It has been a week of triumphs writing-wise: the story sale, something else which I'm not divulging until I have details in hand, and ... I finished my editing pass of Scylla and Charybdis!

I'm still very unsure about the change I made near the end; looking again at how I set up the ending, it may actually be overkill. But it performs a nice, circular loop to the events of the beginning, which reflects the novel's overall shape.

I'm still in love with my characters, too. That probably means they're terrible.

I will probably let the novel rest for a bit, then start looking for reads on at least the opening chapters. I might be brave enough to have someone read the whole book, but I certainly couldn't do it as one big chunk: waiting for that would kill me. Multiple times, potentially (I'm a Highlander).

Because word count reduction was a concern of mine, I started at 161,124 and ended at 153,325. That means I've still got to trim. Most of my cuts were necessary, unneeded verbiage or dialogue exchanges that were weird / clumsy and actually best fixed by simply excising them; I may have to make some tough choices before I get down into reasonable range. Note that I didn't just cut things: I also added, some emotional cues, some references to a new concept, and a new scene. So probably I cut more like ten to twelve thousand words and added a few thousand.

Not sure where I'm going from here. Still plinking around on worldbuilding, but I still have an entire second novel which has been finished for about two months and needs editing ... don't know how to handle that.

4/28 - 5/4
Pages Edited: 30

3 comments:

Aubrie said...

Good luck trimming down those words! Sometimes it's like cutting off my arm. :)

Lindsey Duncan said...

I tend to write very wordy, so for me it's more like cutting the arms off a sweater. Initially, at least! I suspect I'll get down to arm-flesh this time.

Angie said...

Congrats on the story sale and good luck with the editing. That can be so hard.