So, I’ve been deleting lots of material and I just want to mention that I don’t enjoy that.
It turned out, when I opened up Invictus, the unfinished draft was 98,000 words, not 80,000 words. But 80,000 is closer to the words that needed to be there to fit my revised understanding of the plot.
First task: relatively simple revision of the first 250 pp of the manuscript, with a lot of going back and forth to sort out minor continuity issues (that would look pretty major if not fixed!).
Second task: muse upon a sixty-page section. Decide to cut the whole thing. That took a couple of days because ouch.
Third task: write the new scenes that take the place of that section.
The draft is now 102,000 words, but wow, there have been major changes. A lot more got removed than has been added. A lot.
Fourth task: revise the next eighty page section. That’s where I am now. I don’t know how much of this is going to be useable. I may wind up cutting a heck of a lot of it.
Fifth task, still a misty glow on the horizon: write the last section of the story.
This is simultaneously taking a lot longer / being a lot harder than I’d hoped, yet also staying on track. I gave myself months to do this. It’s going to take months, but I still expect to finish the draft before the end of the semester. Hopefully long before the end of the semester. But if it comes to The End before May, I’ll be satisfied.
Current Reading:
- The Liar’s Knot by MA Carrick. I hit a stressful scene and quit for the moment. For me, the most stressful scenes involve tension between characters when I think they ought to be friends, or at least allies, and right now they’re enemies. It’s hard to take. Really well-written series though!
- Daughter of Mystery by Heather Rose Jones. I remembered the recommendation of the great bodyguard in this one and opened it up. I like it a lot, but I didn’t much like seeing the central relationship show signs of shifting from a friendship to a romantic relationship. I was definitely in the mood for a friendship. Again, very well written, superb worldbuilding.
- The Use of Medieval Weaponry by Eric Lowe. This is a very readable book even if you don’t know much about swords or fighting. Eric Lowe’s Quora answers made it clear that he understands the concept of writing a fight scene as well as how the fight actually works in practice. That’s why I picked up this book, which I hope will prove valuable as well as interesting.
- In Arcadia by AKH. I opened this up again when I just did not feel like reading anything else.
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