Milestone Achieved

Sep 21, 2008 Daily Writing, Novels

I don’t consider myself to have ever really stopped writing, though it looks like it from the outside, and I certainly stopped publishing.  I’m thinking a lot about this lately as I draw to the end of this novel rewrite.  If I come up with any great understandings about why I think this, I’ll let you know.  But for now let me leave it here by saying that I’ve written a ton of stuff in the past few years–its just not really stuff that matters in context of this place here.

But that’s changed today.

On August 7th I set myself a major project to begin on with the idea that I didn’t want to make an easy goal my first one.  It’s now September 21st–so essentially six weeks have past.  The main rewrite is done.  The book shrank from about 81K words to just over 73K.  Given that my viewpoint on any short story is that the goal of any pure rewrite of a first draft should result in about a 10% reduction in weight, this feels pretty good.

I intend to go back through it one more time, looking for one specific issue that I want to highlight and make sure I’m consistent.  It has to do with the peculiar way I’m using a magic system, so it’s a little more complex than checking for appearances or whatnot–the notorious changing of a character’s eye color springs to mind for some reason.  This means I’m not really done, but it does feel good to complete a full pass at a project.  It’s a milestone, and if anyone from the old days wanders around here, you may remember just what goals and milestones mean to me.

So, “GO ME!”

Have a great day.

   

100 Pages

Sep 2, 2008 Daily Writing, Novels

So I’ve gotten down to under a hundred pages to go.  With only a little luck I’ll complete the rewrite by the end of next week.  It’s been more work than expected because, honestly, my line writing was not very good.  Strange how time gives you distance.  There was a time where I would have said that this book was as good as I could make it, and here I am seeing flaws everywhere.

Seriously, what’s up there?

I mean, I’ve had full pages dripping in red ink.  Not much more to say about that, I guess.

I want to finish the basic rewrite by the end of the work-week because I want to spend the weekend looking at the big-picture storytelling.  I have one concern pertaining to the protagonist’s decisions that I want to focus on, and I think it best that I give it some serious time–something more than the spans of the mornings I’m giving the rest, anyway.

So, forward.