I might have mentioned earlier (haven’t been here in a while, so I really don’t remember much of the last post I made) that I revised the prologue of my main ms. to death. There is so much aqua colored font in that chapter that it is positively insane what I had missed the first three times I edited it, and up until this weekend, I thought chapter one and three had suffered the heaviest rewriting. But as I said, that was up until this weekend.
While painstakingly going through and attempting to revise through chapter seven, I encountered a problem. Since I had trimmed four pages off of chapter three and added two new ones, the changes, naturally, had a ripple effect. If I had fought for it, I suppose I could have edited chapter seven to death like I was originally planning, but then a certain phrase came to mind right in the middle of my struggle. “If the story does not progress, you have a mess.” In other words, make sure the tangents don’t take you so far away from them main storyline that you end up somewhere in Oz.
Just like that, I decided to do the most drastic thing I have done to date. I marked chapters seven through nine with the grey highlights of future deletion, went back to make sure everything dealing with that entire ordeal was adjusted accordingly, and found that most of chapters four through six either needed to be marked for death, or revised in bright pink font to show a complete story rewrite. In the end, I had to jump from chapter four to chapter ten, killing off a massive 9,271 words. And the fun hasn’t ended yet.
After contorting chapter ten enough to make all of Cirque du Soleil cry out in agony, I saw that the next step in my journey would send chapter eleven to hell and back again. You see, I liked the encounter held between chapters seven and nine, and unfortunately, that encounter is very detrimental to one of the aspects of the plot. So now I need to go through, splice the critical factors from chapter eight-ish into chapter eleven, kill what I don’t need, and somehow survive to see the end of a–hopefully–much brighter tunnel.
The revisions so far have been for the best, improving the plot, flow, and interactions immensely, but seeing what I just had to do and knowing that I’m going to stop the book about five chapters early, I have to wonder how much of a book I’ll actually have left…
