Jason Penney's thoughts on writing, life, and other stuff
Pretty productive morning. I’ve now passed the point where my first attempt at revisions stopped. This means that everything from here on needs even more polish, but it should be the better written half of the book to begin with. I need to take a break, but I’m well on my way to getting to page 300 today.
Not quite where I had hoped to be by now, but not too bad. The current section is in pretty good shape, so hopefully I’ll pick up some speed tomorrow.
I thought I had posted this at the time, but apparently I didn’t.
My One Pass Revision effort was mentioned on Mur Lafferty’s I Should Be Writing (show #41, June 17, 2006). Thanks to Mur for keeping me honest in front of a larger audience.
If you haven’t heard it before, you really ought to check it out.
Took a while to get started this morning, but once I got going things went well. I think I’m going to have some scene re-ordering to do, but I’m going to ignore that (mostly) until after the type in. I’m probably breaking the One Pass process a bit with that, but it’s what I feel I need to do.
The plan is to eat lunch, help bathe the kids, and then get back to this. We’ll see!
Quick post today. I have to go grill, but I wanted to update my progress.
Nothing went at all to plan today, but I got a bit more done.
Chapters 3 and 4 have a number of POV characters. I didn’t head hop within scenes, but I did change characters at scene breaks. I don’t think it’s at all confusing. I had considered rewriting each chapter as a single POV, but I’m not sure I can unless I want to have some very short chapters, or I can come up with some very interesting new material. Chapter 2 was the same way, but I was able to easily reassign the scenes to other characters and make an even split between two of them.
I’m going to push on and hope for the best. I’ll keep trying for single POV per chapter and if it works out everywhere else I’ll have to come back to this stuff. I’ll just make a note in the notebook for now.
Had a really busy weekend, but I finally was able to get some time in tonight… err.. this morning. Fairly heavy rewrites. Changed the point of view on a number of scenes. I removed a few scenes and was able to replace them with only a sentence or two in a later scene. I like some of the stuff I cut, but it really didn’t fit anymore. I wrote a few new scenes as well. I’ll need to review them before moving on, but I’m too tired to do that right now.
I’m going to try and post progress any time I work on the revision. I’ll also put the current page count. I only had a bit of time, but I made some more progress on Chapter 2 today. I had to stop to get other stuff done, but I need to roll some potential changes around in my head.
There’s a great cliffhanger in the middle of Chapter 2. Chapter 2 is too long. It doesn’t have enough material to be split as is (especially since I’m cutting left and right), but I think I see an opportunity to flesh out another important character sooner rather than later.
I doubt I’ll get back to it until at least Sunday, but it’ll be bouncing around my head until then. I’m actually excited about the story again, which is great.
Amazingly I managed to get started today even though many things conspired against me.
I completed the discovery section of the One Pass Revision with little issue. I had pretty much done all that stuff before starting the story, and some of it even still applied. I worry that it may have been too easy. Maybe I did something wrong? We’ll see.
So I started the slog. I managed to be brutal. I hacked the entire first chapter right out of the book. It was a tough choice, but I think it was the right one. I’m holding on to it, because it could easily be expanded into a short story on it’s own, but the book doesn’t need it. Do I think the book is better without it? I’m not sure, but it’s not the solid start I want, so it had to go.
Chapter 2 Scene 1 didn’t need too much work. Chapter 2 Scene 2 wasn’t bad, but I rewrote most of it. Chapter 2 is light on dialog. Chapter 1 wasn’t. Since it’s gone, I needed to get some more dialog into the book earlier. This removed a bit of infodumping, and allowed me to improve some weak characterization.
Not a bad hour and half’s worth of work. Special thanks to the kids for letting me get it done.
Ok. I think I’m ready to start on the revisions. Let me just check the supply list
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