Edits Continue

Since I posted last week, I've passed the halfway point for the edits in my SF novel (yay!), and started working on the synopsis (boo!). I'm sure that for-real authors can do a full edit of their novels in like a day or two. Yeah... I'm on week 5 maybe (I'm afraid to go back and count), but this is probably because I only work on it for about a half-hour each day... on the days I actually work on it. Must be more disciplined about this!

If you were reading the blog last year, you know how I feel about "The Synopsis", but it has to be done for those persnickety agents and publishers. Something about making sure the story holds together and that you're eloquent enough to condense and convey it. Grrrr. And here's a news flash - I'm not good at writing a synopsis. There's just so much STUFF, that it's hard to figure out what needs to be in, what can be left out and how to make it not sound like a train that's afraid to slow down.

Later this week, The Vacation. I promise.

Progress

Doing well this week - got 1100 words written on Quint's book, Gladiator (curent title), on Monday and another 500 yesterday. I've also been watching episodes of Survivorman and doing some web research to figure out how to write the parts with Quint in the wild. So that should help with the word count later. I'll be so on top of the complications that the words will rush in a torrent from my fingers to the keyboard and I'll finish the story in a week, right? Right? I am now at about 20,000 words into Gladiator, so about 1/5th of the way through. I really need to increase the pace though. It's been slowed down immensely due to the times that I got maybe a couple hundred words a week written on it. Yikes!

I've also been editing Jayna's book, Historian, and have figured out what I want to add in to make the reader take my bad guy, Colfax, more seriously. He does have a plan. I swear it. In the rough drafts, all the reader saw of his plan was him trying to find out who got the Historian's powers and get his dastardly hands on her. In the background though, he's been making use of the Historian powers that he did manage to get access to. I finally figured out what he would have been doing with them, so now I just have to go back and pepper those episodes in throughout the book. Yay.

Later this week I'll need some help with the weaponry for my SciFi novel, so start thinking about what you do/don't like for futuristic weapons. I'm still defining what I need, so once I have it clear in my head, I'll be bouncing the ideas off you guys and requesting your input. No death-rays or things like that. This should be stuff that normal military and private security would have access to, so nothing too massively destructive. I'm also not staging any spaceship battles at this point, so while it would be good for the sake of thoroughness, that stuff is not my priority right now.

Oh, and I hate painting & priming. The only thing making it bearable right now is that my mom gave me the first few J.D. Robb In Death audiobooks and I'm listening to those as I slave away. Yes, I've read each about a half dozen times already, but it's cool listening to them. They're great stories, even if you know what's happening, and I'm amazed at the details that I'm picking up when I'm forced to listen to someone else read. I've got a clearer picture of the characters in my head now. It's pretty neat.

So happy middle of the week to you all!!

Editing the good stuff out

I've been deep in editing land on my UF novel and I'm getting frustrated with it. The first chapter has me ready to rip my hair out (as if my brush doesn't do enough of that already). I think I've gone over it too many times. I've edited it myself a few times (as in like 10), had other people critique it and have even dreamed about it. 

After incorporating all the suggestions, I think I've successfully managed to weed out anything that made it unique and engrossing. No kidding. Admittedly, early drafts had some major POV (Point-Of-View) issues, too much time spent on extraneous things, and some cases of telling vs showing. It definitely needed a tune-up. But... 

I think what happened is that I'd hit a sentence and think, "Oh, well, that doesn't need to be there. I show that aspect of his personality later, so I'll remove this reference to it." Before you know it, all of Chase's personality has been sucked out of him, and instead of a conscientious but mouthy teenager, you have this boring narrator who sounds like they came straight from your English Classics class. Kill me. And kill Chase while you're at it, because he's clearly too boring to live. So now I'm going back in and trying to breathe life back into Chase's poor corpse. Wish me luck. And in the comments section, hit me with a good snarky comment or insult. I'll pick my favorite and let Chase loose with it in the novel.

I sure hope the rest of the novel isn't this problematic!

Starting Point

Here's my status as a writer: unpublished. Duh. But I'm getting closer to that goal all the time. I'm currently editing my first Urban Fantasy novel (presently unnamed which is driving me crazy) and it's about to go out to my critique group for input. I've got a couple of SF short stories written and I'm working on the 3rd in that series - I might just decided to make one big novel out of it, since it seems that I'm better at writing novels than short stories. 

Then I have two laughably bad more traditional fantasy novels backed up at home that will probably never again see the light of day. I liked the world and characters I made quite a bit but they'd require major overhaul to make them publishable. I have a mountain lion type character in them who's bonded to a human. But this poor animal is just a human in animal skin - all her thoughts, reasoning and motivations are human, not feline. Big problemo there. Two entire books of that, and she's one of the main chars. I can't imagine trying to go back and fix that through edits. I might as well just do a complete re-write. ANYWAYS.

So here's what I found out about editing:

1. When you're new to editing, it's almost harder than writing the novel itself (don't know if that changes)
2. I edit better on paper than on the pc
3. It's tricksy
   
4. I'm not good at it
   

I was doing okay with it, thanks to Paperback Writer (also try her workshop - lot's of good stuff and links to more good stuff in there) and all her advice to writers (I stalk her blog daily). But at some points, I couldn't decide quite how to fix a problem at the time I was editing. I'd end up bracketing whole paragraphs and leaving myself a note like"Fix Voice" or "Too emotional - over the top", figuring I'd fix it while inputting the edits. Then I finally got around to inputting the edits (some 2 weeks later thanks to a full-time job, kids, husband, housework -my husband is thinking "What? She does housework?" - other stuff, etc), and found out that I had a problem. I wasn't entrenched in the story anymore. I hadn't been immersed in it for days and days. I had forgotten the character's voices or why they shouldn't sound like my five year old at her whiniest, because, hey, that sounds perfectly normal to me... Yeah, so my advice to you is fix it while you're editing and the work is immediate in your mind. Now, PW had said this in her posts. But I got lazy and didn't do it. Big mistake.