The Endless Expanse of Editing

I'm still on Step One of the editing process, the assembly of the scenes. The Roster, if you will. Who is here and who isn't.

I haven't made a lot of progress lately, what with the holidays coming up and all that. It's a lame excuse, I know. But hopefully come January, my days off will actually be off and I'll be able to work more on it.

I'm about halfway through my Word document, which means I'm more than halfway through my story, because there was a lot of extraneous stuff at the end for the sake of words that I no longer need to worry about. Basically, it just continued the story of the main character, and what he does later, which was mostly retell the whole novel to other people. You know, for words. So I'm not even going to look at that right now.

So It Begins

I have begun the lengthy editing process. I'm starting by going through the first draft of Cold Blooded, and just making a list of all the scenes. Some, I think, are actually more than one scene, but since I wrote it without chapter breaks and just a "* * *" most of the times the setting changed or time skipped forward, it's hard to tell what is supposed to be a scene. So at any rate, I'm making a list of the events, as they happen.

Once I'm done with that, I'll start picking at which scenes are actually important and which ones don't move the plot forward. Any information in the cut scenes that is still needed will be recycled into new, better scenes. I've already started a second document of all the chunks of backstory, so that I can have them as a handy reference guide for when I want to sprinkle that information back in. Right now it’s just in a couple of big blocks, and that's no good. My research tells me that you’re not supposed to do that.

Endings and Beginnings

I'm back! NaNoWriMo is over, and I'm here with my report.

I did not make it to 50,000 words. I made it to just over 35,000. That is not to say that I came away with nothing. Even if I never turn this draft into a proper book, that doesn't mean it was wasted.

I have learned a valuable lesson about myself. Even if I can't describe a setting, or a character, or world build worth shit, my god, can I kill people. It's like time slows down and I can detail every moment of their demise. There's a procedural cop show, I've forgotten which one, CSI or Bones or something, where it does this interior simulation of arteries getting severed and whatnot? It's like that.

So I killed Steve fifteen times, and rendered each one in beautiful detail, but at no point mentioned what he looked like. That's how I roll.