Why.

Ask why.

Ask why until you have all the answers that you think with your characters' minds.

Frustrated that I don't have any twists, I realized I haven't even asked why enough. I've spent the past couple days trying to fill in the holes. I hope they don't appear as weak fixes. Christian's convoluted plan was the thinnest of the group given the way it was resolved.

122 pages left and it'll be ready for people to read.

Found a chapter today that I never wrote. Deleted it and replaced it with a subordinate clause in the following chapter. Obviously it was not an important chapter. Mark Twain Rule is in effect.

It's one of my earliest. :)

Revision is 18% complete. I'm hoping this effort will accelerate when I get to later chapters when characters' relationships were better defined. I'm editing Matty's first phone call. They were originally just friends not ex-spouses so the type of familiarity Cy takes with her is no longer appropriate. Add to that some weird "it's been 20 years" even though I already revealed he knew she was coming and it turns into a major scrub job. Hopefully I can still make it shine.

I have not gotten as much done this week as I had planned. Nothing over the weekend. It was all wedding and guests and reading The Curse of Challion. Then Tuesday was Franconia Notch. Wednesday saw a little progress as well as yesterday. Not much more than an hour each day, though. Still, if I apply myself appropriately during my commute, I should finish by the end of September.

I'm anxious to get some outside feedback.

That last post was written on a Blackberry while I paced through North Station, waiting for the commuter train to arrive. Based on the number of errors, clearly I shouldn't pace and type. :)

Editing is going well. I've fully scrubbed the first 7 chapters, so almost 10% complete. You know when you're scrubbing the tub and you get that pool of dirty water but then you rinse it away and there is sparkling white porcelain beneath? That's what this feels like. Having finished the manuscript and fully evolved the characters' relationships, I am now able to revise the beginning and align it with those relationships. I can also seed certain character attitudes that didn't properly come across beforehand.

Once my vacation comes, I'll lay into editing more fully and see if I can't plow through more of this. I want to have a finished second draft by my birthday.

As I expected would happen, I"
'M thinking editing on hardcopy is untennible. There's just too much that needs changing. I need the option of revising whole pages without having to handwrite it, which is exceedingly difficult on a train.

I posted early chapters of Black Magic and Barbecue Sauce to this journal. Some of you even commented. Why the hell didn't any of you tell me it was this bad?!?! What kind of friends are you?

I can write every day. I can write twice a day. Editing is HARD! I'm not sure I can keep an every-day pace going through this. I have a chapter--one I really liked when I wrote it--showing the home relationship of two characters, one of whom you've met once and one you haven't met at all. Who the hell cares about these people? This chapter is boring! What little insight there is is redundant to a previous chapter. The entire thing is founded on a pratfall gimmick. What a load of crap!

No one will ever read this shit.

I have read four books since I finished my novel, three of which I only read last year. This is a good thing. I enjoy Bujold's Miles series enough that reading the novels again is still exciting, but the stories are still fresh enough in my mind that I can focus on other things, like when she takes the time to explain through exposition and when through dialogue. Which works when and why. Her use of adverbs, and even the progression of the quality of her writing. Compare Memory with the Warrior's Apprentice and you notice a definite growth in the writer's ability.

This has exposed errors in my own decisions, errors that I aim to correct and look forward to the rounder, more complete story they will create (for all my attempts, Dawn is still a relatively two-dimensional character, even if she is no longer the damsel in distress that she was before. And Dawn has not been a fitting name. I need to find something different that isn't too exotic but not too mundane either).

So this morning I went to Jackie's and edited the first 28 pages of the manuscript. Sure there's a crapload more to do and I might be faster just typing (especially since I'll have to type all these corrections), but editing by hand has a number of benefits. It slows the process down and requires me to weigh each action and word choice. It allows me to see how those decisions are framed in a larger context (not something as easy to accomplish on a 10" screen. And I edit in red pen, so let me tell you, there's some serious humility going on when you see swaths of your text crossed out mercilessly. Chapters 1 and 2 (1 having been previously revised even [for the audio sample on my website which I guess now I'll have to revise]) took some considerable straightening. Two is in a much better place than it was before.

Chapter 3 hasn't suffered too much from corrections yet. It was originally chapter 6 and it is heartening to see how much my writing improved between 2 and 6. Hopefully that means the rest of the manuscript isn't as crappy as I sometimes felt it was.

I didn't sleep well last night. While I had more to say on the subject, thinking right now is difficult and I want to go back to the couch and play some Wii.

Bye.

Working on the chapter that was part of the original short story. Was the opening scene. Searching for salvageable bits. Holy crap this thing sucked! How did any of you read that? I should just scrap the entire thing and pretend it doesn't exist.

You know, since I've written my preface, I've referenced it in a few chapters later in the book. I'm thinking--and I'll have to wait until the draft is finished--that I can just scrap the prologue all together and keep the references as they do a better job of implying what happened without actually retelling that entire scene. I like starting with chapter one. I like starting with William Henderson and his suits.

As I type this, I realize I had already decided on a more poignant end with Cy and Dawn and an Epilogue would just ruin that so it's scrapped. Scrap the prologue too, I think. I'm 90% sure that chapter's going away.

I wrote today for the first time in a week. It wasn't a "I need to take time off and recharge my batteries by reading," week. It was a "Oh my god Washington, DC, was exhausting and work is kicking my ass" week. Technically, it should be kicking my ass now, but I wanted to write this down.

So for those of you that read the prologue, enjoy it, you probably won't see it in print.

So there are a couple people I want to send a finished manuscript to for proofing and criticism. I hate to send out a first draft, but at the same time, revision immediately followed by revision kills enthusiasm. Maybe I can do a spot check on the worst parts. I don't know. That's a ways off still, but that date is approaching and I need to be prepared.

Last week I printed out my manuscript to date. It was reinvigorating to see such a large stack of paper. Even though I'm only 1/3 of the way finished with the ms, the mountain of dead trees reminded me what I have accomplished so far. My intent was to use the printed chapters to separate out and reorder, kind of like note cards. Then I discovered the outline feature and reordered everything fairly quickly. I also determined the remaining chapters dedicated to Rian Inkwright, Skere Khane, and Pi Fu. I still need to hash out how many chapters I need for Bear, Imsikwatash, and Goyathlay. Since Bear and Imsi are the main characters, I'll just write until their stories are finished and see what the total is. Goya is perhaps the most insignificant secondary character, a little one dimensional, so that creates a whole different challenge to determining how many chapters I want to give him because I don't know what's necessary to make him a better character. We'll see after I'm done writing, eh?

So what I've been doing is using the hardcopy to edit. I know I said I wouldn't edit previous chapters until I was finished. It's an easy trap to fall into. I'm not sure if I've fallen into it. I have one foot in for sure, but I'm alternating between writing and editing and that is satisfying. I made moderate changes to the prologue (now available in the Inkwell) and significant changes to chapter 1. I chopped 3 pages at once in chapter 1. It's hard to go on when you realize you wrote for 3 pages and nothing from those pages is salvageable. But what I replaced it with (or am in the process of replacing it with) is so much better. I'm very pleased. In fact, that oppressive feeling I have when I'm writing, knowing what I've created previously is such crap is lessened a little bit because I know now that what I have is less crap than it was before. Yay for that!

...umm, okay, that is all. :)