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A Progress Report, Long In The Making
In between preparing for this weeks reading at True Colors Bookstore and trying to memorize my script for Tellabration! on the 26th, I’ve also been working on developmental edits for Dark Water Blues.
This has been a low priority, since I’m not contracted for it, but my editor at Carina Press came back with a page full of suggestions for me to mull over and possibly make before we go to Acquisitions with this novel. She said she loved the primary characters and thought the secondary characters interesting. She thought the social groups in the world were intriguing and fleshed out, and loved the humorous aspects of the story. I grinned when she noted that I wrote awesome sex scenes. The meat of the revisions asked for deal with pacing, and to a lesser extent, worldbuilding and characterization.
For those of you playing our home game, I’ve blog before that I think Dark Water Blues is both the best and worst thing I’ve ever written. Editor M is helping me repair and cut the parts that need work, and I am hopeful this will turn into one of the best things I’ve ever written, period.
But man, is it a hard slog. I’ve gone through the manuscript twice now with her revision letter in hand, being brutal and cutting things away. The novel has shrunk from 86K to 80K, but I will be adding things to shore up the worldbuilding, to deepen one of my protagonists, and to make life miserable for the other one. I also plan to bring the antagonists more to the fore; a part of my craft that I need to work on. I really don’t enjoy writing the bad guys, which I think make me an anomaly among writers.
While there are lots of crunchy worldbuilding bits in the manuscript, it turns out I’ve put them in the wrong places (which is a danger when you write by the seat of your pants, and this was defiantly a “pantser” novel). To help me with this major restructuring, I’ve broken the novel down into its component parts and written an outline. 14 chapters. 25 large scenes within those chapters. 52 small scenes / sections total. It’s like having 52 unruly kittens pouncing across the floor of your prose, knocking over your plot, shredding your tone, leaping on and off of your themes. I despair of wrangling them back into a coherent whole, but I know it must be done.
And when it is done, I am hopeful that Dark Water Blues will be sleek and beautiful and that it will be something Editor M and I can go to Acquisitions with and then sell to my publisher.
This has been a low priority, since I’m not contracted for it, but my editor at Carina Press came back with a page full of suggestions for me to mull over and possibly make before we go to Acquisitions with this novel. She said she loved the primary characters and thought the secondary characters interesting. She thought the social groups in the world were intriguing and fleshed out, and loved the humorous aspects of the story. I grinned when she noted that I wrote awesome sex scenes. The meat of the revisions asked for deal with pacing, and to a lesser extent, worldbuilding and characterization.
For those of you playing our home game, I’ve blog before that I think Dark Water Blues is both the best and worst thing I’ve ever written. Editor M is helping me repair and cut the parts that need work, and I am hopeful this will turn into one of the best things I’ve ever written, period.
But man, is it a hard slog. I’ve gone through the manuscript twice now with her revision letter in hand, being brutal and cutting things away. The novel has shrunk from 86K to 80K, but I will be adding things to shore up the worldbuilding, to deepen one of my protagonists, and to make life miserable for the other one. I also plan to bring the antagonists more to the fore; a part of my craft that I need to work on. I really don’t enjoy writing the bad guys, which I think make me an anomaly among writers.
While there are lots of crunchy worldbuilding bits in the manuscript, it turns out I’ve put them in the wrong places (which is a danger when you write by the seat of your pants, and this was defiantly a “pantser” novel). To help me with this major restructuring, I’ve broken the novel down into its component parts and written an outline. 14 chapters. 25 large scenes within those chapters. 52 small scenes / sections total. It’s like having 52 unruly kittens pouncing across the floor of your prose, knocking over your plot, shredding your tone, leaping on and off of your themes. I despair of wrangling them back into a coherent whole, but I know it must be done.
And when it is done, I am hopeful that Dark Water Blues will be sleek and beautiful and that it will be something Editor M and I can go to Acquisitions with and then sell to my publisher.