Family time

My sister came to visit over the last weekend. We caught up, drank, talked about stuff, and she cooked, so I have food in the house. Food. Nice.

The funny thing about having family around is that when it happens infrequently enough that it's an honest-to-goodness event, it's important to take advantage of that time. That shouldn't mean I don't do any writing things, but that's exactly how it feels. I had this little 'tick, tick, tick' in my head, letting me know that whatever I'm doing at the moment may be fun, but it's not editing. 

I should be editing. I should be spending at least a little time staring at this pile of words and trying to beat it into submission. On the plus side she finally read my first draft and really liked it. 

And then - at my request - she poked holes in it. Lots of holes. Some of them I have a way to fix, and others I have no blooming idea on how to fix yet. There's still that big horrible plot hole that I need to find and fix. 

I'm glad she came. New things to do once I've finished the thing I'm doing. This writing stuff certainly isn't boring. Now to go do some more editing, and at some point I know I'll need to figure out where I've accidentally left a good third of the printed pages that I left scribbles over. 

Maybe I could have asked my sister.

New things

First times are great. Except… when they’re not.

This is the first time I've succeeded in finishing a story of anything over short story length, (courtesy of nanowrimo, which boosted my word count from 25 000 words written in what, two years -  to something around 75 000 words) and the first time I've had to really think about editing.

Editing is a joyous thing. Its taking the drek that seems like some never-ending thing that I can’t see the good parts from the bad, and working through it to find the rough diamond that I’m reliably assured lies in the heart of all manuscripts. Its picking through the dumb lines, mistakes and typos. Its finding out that time after time, I've used the same word two sentences running, something which I think would annoy the hell out of me were I reading it.

Wait, I am reading it, and it annoys me. It also bores me. My goal was to run through the whole story looking for the things that don’t make sense, the plot elements that go nowhere, the missing bits. After reading the whole thing through, I was bored. I bored myself with my own writing. Yep, there were fun bits, and certain parts I thought were quite clever. Yep, in all probability, those are the parts that are likely needing stripped out at some point.

Yeah, its almost definitely true at some point.

Currently I’m at page 55 of approximately 8 million as far as I can see. I won’t give up, but I think I started this some time back in the stone age. At the rate I’m going, I think humanity will either have evolved into a higher state of consciousness, or nuked itself over so many times that our mutant forms may actually be able to mate with spiders.

In any case, woven through all this new editing stuff is realising that there’s something wrong with the story. Its the way the climaxes don’t work properly or something, maybe the beats are wrong (if that’s what I’m actually talking about), or off. Its there. I can feel it, and I don’t have enough awareness of story to tell me what it is. Hopefully I’ll figure it out in the next pass.

Yes. The prospect of doing this all over again is filling me with excitement.

Really.

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