Friday, April 9, 2010

... fifth draft ahead

The doc's in hand. Full speed ahead.

Edit 1: The minor edits (mostly minor consistency edits which involved either changing one word or deleting a sentence or short paragraph) are all done. I've already begun doing the larger fixes, some of which have had some slightly surprising results. The scene where Jyre and Daelus meet for the first time in Chapter 1 got a very gentle but rather complete overhaul, mostly focusing on the priority of observations to seem more natural and less story-tellish. Chapter 2 is getting some much heavier edits, much of which is focused on the tone of some of Ghost's middle sections, where I think I strayed too far into the absurd rather than the dark comedy that he came to represent. For example, this is a paragraph that was cut.

The room seemed to be as I left it; the sink, tub, and can were all filthy, but didn’t seem to have body parts in them. That was stupid anyway; why would a zombie put its body parts into bathroom fixtures? I had this absurd thought in my mind of it trying to wash its hands, take a bath, or take a dump, and parts of itself falling off, and then realized I was probably crazier than most people told me.

While amusing, this sort of segue into maddness really didn't help move the scene forward, nor did it really add anything to Ghost's character other than that he's slightly nuts. Okay... TOO nuts. He's not really as nuts at that paragraph makes him out to be. The entire section that paragraph called home was scrapped and rewritten to, as I already said, move it from an absurd satire to more the realm of dark comedy.

Edit 2: Can you deal with more Lytha? I sure could. A 1000 word give or take addition to Chapter 2 gives us a few bits of highly concentrated totally new Lytha.

More to come!

2 comments:

ehcmier said...

Woot! Go go go! :D

Marianna Casko said...

Should you have your editor look at Clifton Thrift?? Hm?