Traveller's Tales

So the Big Edit is… done!

Sort of.

What I mean is, everything I wanted to get done, is done.  But there are other things that I’ve discovered, in the process of getting the things that needed to get done, done, that now also need to get done.

For one, the manuscript bloated.  Predictable, and something a more experienced writer would have known intuitively would happen as a result of an edit that deep, but I hadn’t thought about it along those lines, so I need to do a third pass, to trim the bloat.

There’s more, of course — a lot of little things that I found while I was digging around in there.  I won’t go into the gory details, but it’s going to put a few more days on the edit schedule.  Definitely not weeks, and the worst, I think, is over.  Very much thinking it’ll be DONE done by end of the holiday weekend.

And at least it won’t depend on bus drivers knowing how to not drive like a piston, or seatmates oozing over into my side of the seat, or the fans not being on — I’m off starting Thursday, and that’s all edit time, baby!

(well, not ALL edit time, there’ll be fun and OMGWTFBBQ to be had, considering it’s the 4th… but that’s a lot of good time for writing, and my new writer’s hideaway beckons!)

Other people call that “editing,” I suppose, but that’s what my edits were like during the first pass of this latest, most complex revision.  I mentioned that earlier, so I’m not going to belabor the point other than to say it was hard but rewarding, and I’m really happy with the resultant edits, now that the first, painful pass is complete.

So now it’s a simple numbers game.  I’m about 3/4 of the way through the second pass of the big revision, and I’m doing it like this:

Because it was such a sweeping change, I feel as though I should be not only checking the changes for little tense and person shifts I missed the first time through (and there are a scant few of those), but also checking to assure I’ve kept tone and character intact. I had some good insights towards the end of the first pass that standardized some concepts and let me work in a little bit of the original internal dialogue without defeating the purposes of the original person/tense shift, so now I’ve gone through and made sure I’ve leveraged those ideas throughout the book.

As for the changes, I feel as though they’ve made for a much stronger story.  It’s okay if Erik relies on denial and dissimulation to survive, psychologically speaking, so long as the reader can perceive the internal conflict he’s going through and identify with it, or at least understand that it’s a defense mechanism being used by a desperate man under duress to try to cope with a highly stressful and deadly situation.  That makes him sympathetic, even tragic — which is good, considering what I’ll be doing to him soon…

But that’s a story for another day.

In the meantime, 3/4 done with pass 2 means that pass will be done tomorrow — I’ve been doing a quarter a day on this pass.  After that, there’s some basic polishing to be done, a few minor elements to incorporate, and some verbage to trim, and it’ll be ready for lobbing at my agent and co-conspirator.

I’ve invested a lot of bitching into the painful process of ripping out a first person present tense  narrative and re-tuning it for third person past tense.  The tense is psychologically tough; the character has been a first-person thinker for quite a number of years now, so that’s what’s causing so much of  the ‘go back and re-read it, and correct all the tense mistakes’ process.  Maddening, as I generally consider my grammar to be moderately polished, and mistakes like those look seriously grade-school.

I think I’m done bitching about switching into third person though.  In fact, since I’ve already given away the game in the post subject, I’ll say I think it’s not only necessary, but it’s fixing a lot of what I didn’t realize was broken.

Yeah, stuff was broken.

Among many other things, I’m an actor.  Unlike my writing, which is on the brink of professional art, I’ve been paid many times in the past for my acting, and I’m told I’m pretty good at it.  Because of that skill set, I do a lot of dialogue in my head before I commit it to paper — give myself a little private performance, lay the characters and the scene out, figure out what dialogue sounds awkward, that sort of thing.

For the first-person narrative, I’d do the same thing to get the character’s thoughts nailed down before I wrote them.  Unfortunately, I now realize I was acting more than I was writing, and that’s where the bulk of the disconnect — which is resulting in the POV shift — took place.

It’s taken the last few reviews of the manuscript to realize it, but the first person POV was actually robbing that character of depth, because I was failing to weave external expressions and unconscious mannerisms into his internal ruminations.  I hadn’t realized it because, when I ‘did the part’ in my head, he was plenty deep, plenty conflicted, his physical confidence and mental competence short-circuited by severe disorientation, physical conflict and psychological horror.

But many of the acting cues I ’saw’ while I was doing my own internal performance failed to make it to the paper, because he was thinking to himself and I didn’t know how to fit the action into his internal dialogue.  The fidgeting, the nervous glances, the smiles a bit too wide — very, very few of these kinds of things made it to text, and so he came off as a much shallower jerk than he really is.

And really, turning people off from one of your primary POV characters isn’t such a smart thing.  Donaldson may have been able to do it, but I’m not Donaldson, and I did not want this character to be anywhere near as disliked as Covenant.

And so, I’ve made progress.  Much yet to do, but the work continues.

I’m editing.  I like what the results look like, and I think I’ll be very, very pleased with the end result.

But I am fighting a pitched battle with one of my lead characters, and he’s not giving an inch without inflicting pain or drawing blood.

This is the guy I had originally written in first person, present tense, as a way to make his thinking more accessible to the reader   (this was my theory, and my thought experiment has officially backfired and gone horribly wrong; lesson learned, mea culpa, see my other post about that).  Now I’m wrangling him into third person past, like the rest of the narrative.  What’s coming out, I like — but Oh My Freaking God he’s taking For Bloody Ever to make the transformation.

I keep re-reading the chapters I think I’ve just wrangled, only to find massive errors in tense and in person, even in the brand new stuff that’s gone in to replace the first-person ruminations.  Beyond that, I have to write, put it away, and re-read it fresh the next day because I’m not sure it’s reading true until well after I’ve written it.  The shift in POV is so jarring to me, after living with this character for so long in first person, that it’s even tough to be certain I’m writing well, and that’s not something I usually worry too much about.

I’m finding myself very interested in this phenomenon.  I’m fascinated that a mental construct like a character can associate itself so strongly with linguistic concepts (tense, point of view) that the process of revising those concepts can so thoroughly screw with my head.  It’s a serious crash course in pragmatics (not pragmatism), which I may have to dig into a bit deeper after this edit is done.

Wacky stuff.

Finally picked one up; they had a model that lists for too much money on sale for just barely cheap enough for me to consider, and then when I convinced myself I’d actually write on the bus with it, I finally succumbed.

So there it is, the little devil — and to justify the expense, I have actually been writing on the bus with it!  Well, attempting in some cases, as there are definitely some lessons to learn when trying to use it.  Like, those twisty windy roads near my house?  I shouldn’t try to use it when we’re driving on those.  And when some rude SOB leans all the way back in their chair?  Yeah, it’s not real useful then.  Especially because the keyboard layout is a little modified from the usual — scale is slightly smaller, and keyboard layout is scrunched a bit, so typing blind won’t work until I’ve relearned the keyboard.  Soon, but not yet.

Aside from that, though, this morning was a great proof of concept.  I napped until the highway, then broke out the little beast, lit up OpenOffice and went to town.  Already knew what I wanted to do, and while I didn’t finish, I certainly made enough of a dent to know I’ll be using this even more.

If I can snake some lunchtime I’ll pop the hood open and do some more, but at least I can start reclaiming some of the travel time I thought I’d sacrificed forever to the gods of Transit last year.

…must… resist temptation… do not install… no WoW… no WoW!

Between laziness, multiple crises and my lovable online addiction, I haven’t done much in My World(tm) lately. In some ways, this is bad, because I need to figure out exactly where I left off on book two. Although I outline (and had already done so extensively for The Grey Lord), I don’t write in a linear fashion, so there’s bound to be some confusion as to how exactly I was meaning to get to point G from point D, when point E was already taking me towards point J. That sort of thing. If it sounds confusing with letters, it’s much more so when there aren’t any, so it’s going to take some thinking to work out exactly what the hell is going on.

In some ways, though, this is actually pretty good. In between re-reading the parts of the second book that are already done, I end up questioning my original assumptions about the story, inserting my characters into alternate scenes and seeing if the story plays out better in other ways. There’s also a bunch of research to be done (speaking of which, does anyone know the smallest possible size a wood molecule can be and still be large enough to connect in a sheet? I’m sort of using this chart as a rough guide, but I’d like to know how much I can reasonably shave off from the thinnest bond size. It doesn’t have to be sturdy or even cohesive outside of another supporting structure, it just has to be thick enough to be technically a sheet of contiguous wood), so the left-brain right-brain interplay has caused a lot of interesting daydreaming, and from the daydreaming there’s some great new ideas popping up to fill in the blanks. Feedback loops are fun!

I guess that means that I’m revving up again. That’s good. It’s not “writing every day” good yet, but it’s definitely getting there.

(PS, after some more research it looks like I’m probably in the 10-100 nanometer range for my wood molecule, but I’d still like to get a properly informed and educated bit of information, so if there’s any bored microbiologists within viewing range of this blog, please set me straight!)