Monday, December 30, 2013

Welcome to the Hell of Editing

Today's Mood Puppy is a Mood Astra! Astra is Kyrie's first daughter. :) All fresh and happy and ready for adventure, she was just like me when I finished my second novel last month (YAY). I looked forward to finally starting the editing process on both books.

Astra, at least, is still happy. I, in comparison, took a wrong turn at Albuquerque.

Though editing has been a trial at times, it has taught me a lot and I have come to enjoy the tightening and polishing. I felt excited about applying those new skills to East of the Sun. What changed?

One, I started writing that first book in 2010. It is two days from clicking over into 2014, and to say that I'm a far better writer now is pretty safe. So part of my initial Edit-Shock comes from realizing how MUCH work I'm going to be doing to bring the first parts of EotS into line with what I can do now.

Two, in realizing how far the writing has to go, I'm seeing all sorts of places that are going to require significant plot changes, and that makes me very, very happy that I bought Aeon Timeline at the end of NaNoWriMo because I think I'm going to need it to keep track of who does what when, where, and why.

There's a lot of pure terror in me right now, looking at these two books. I love the story, I love my characters, I can see so many ways to make both of them better. It's just going to be...hard. Very hard. Harder, in fact, than writing the books in the first place because everything needs to get so much tighter.

So I have done two things to motivate myself, because they always say that the best tools for finishing things are a deadline and accountability!

First, literary agent and author Donald Maass is giving a hands-on seminar in the DFW area for aspiring novelists the first week in May. I got in, and now I MUST get the books in a state which will not completely embarrass me! In order for me to benefit most from this seminar, the books need to be as good as they possibly can be, so that the feedback I get will really help me. I want to start submitting these to agents by the end of 2014.

Second, I decided that I would write about editing EotS here, in the blog, chapter by chapter. I will feel disgusted with myself if I don't see progress in those blog entries, and it will also serve as a record of how I've improved my writing because I'll be utilizing everything I've learned in the last four years. And I think I can do it in general terms, without giving out any spoilers!

So here we go. First, my logline: This is a story about a girl whose family sells her to a bear. And about everything that follows from it...

I went through my first two chapters of EotS and realized that they were probably actually three chapters, first off. The two were long already (my chapters tend to run 5k words average in rough--these were 5.5K and 6.5K) and I saw that there were other scenes I needed to put in.

Reasons for those other scenes? My first chapter needs to start off with action and I hadn't given one of my mains enough time in the spotlight. I'd also kept her more passive and she was not that kind of character! In addition, I needed less overall description and more of the action showing the dire situation the family is in, to build tension.

Along with that dire situation I realized that I was missing an opportunity to introduce the main villain via a violent encounter instead of with passive hints. Instead of merely showing the aftermath as I had before, I wrote the violent scene in. In the process I discovered some surprising things about the relationship between the two oldest brothers...things I'll be able to use later.

So, more active scenes, stepping up the tension, the main characters strive actively to keep the family alive and hopefully gain our sympathy, while some others...well, you'll find out in time. But I decided that things still weren't bad enough, and that I was being too easy on my characters--I had this tendency, and have tried to squash it. So I decided to poison the last possible easy food source, traumatizing one of my main characters in the process, and also killed off an innocent minor character.

Now things are really bad. One life lost, another dying, everyone's hungry, one desperate family member has attacked another, and a monster is loose on the mountain. Awesome! On to chapter 2.

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