Archive for Edits

If the story does not progress…

{ August 26, 2008 @ 12:58 pm } · { Edits, The Daily Grind }
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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…

Progress

{ August 5, 2008 @ 11:56 am } · { Edits, Life Updates, Netbook Progress }
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Now that you’re older and wiser for it, how often have you thought back, really thought back, to the very first thing you really wanted to be when you grew up, and wish, now, that you had managed to do it?

As the job hunt continues–fruitless though it may be–I can at least be thankful that, while I am unemployed, I can get at least through the revisions of my fantasy book without the hassle of life on top of that.
Whether I’ll make my personal deadline before I find a job is a very certain uncertainty, but I will happily take whatever progress I can grasp at.

Thus far, the prologue has had a very long face-life. I mean it–the prologue is longer than my first chapter! In ms. format, the prologue is nine pages long, while the first chapter is only six. I was originally working to shorten the prologue, as I–and many others are guilty of this, I’m sure–usually skip it if it’s more than a paragraph when I’m reading. Shameful, but true! The information in mine is…well, it isn’t critical to the plot at all. I use the prologue as a place to insert back-story and information that you don’t really need to know, but would help you get a sense of what the overall story would be about. I made it so that if you did skip it like I would, the first chapter would still catch your eye, and with any luck, reel you in just the same.

Chapter one had the next largest amount of re-working that got done. I hacked it down by three pages and replaced them with one and a half fresh ones, which was a very good move. The hook has a lot more bite to it now, and that is very pleasing. Chapters two through four we adjusted accordingly, but nothing overly impressive had to be changed. I cut down the end of chapter four by three pages as well, and only replaced it with a paragraph.
The first twenty or so chapters of the fantasy book are probably going to eat me alive with minor errors, but I’m hoping it won’t take too much time away from being able to continue work on SaSu. It’s only a side job, and obviously takes a backseat where my novel is concerned, but I’m working on a schedule right now to get that done at the same time. Only time will tell if it works out.