The Great Scene Excision of 2019

This is what I'm looking at right now.

 

It's every scene in Cold Blooded, or rather, in the rough draft NaNo abomination that is going to become Cold Blooded. I took my list of scenes, and starting putting notes on them, determining the fate of that scene. Then I color coded them, because colors are pretty.

Looking Back and Looking Forward

Step One is complete. I have broken the rough draft into 41 scenes, or scene-like entities. Technically, "Scene" 41 is just all the extra nonsense at the end, but I've been putting in section breaks at each scene change, so I can jump straight there, so Scene 41 is just where I would go if I want any of that.

So I have 40 scenes, really. Some are long, some are short. Some are probably several scenes crammed together, while others are just random events. But they're all broken up and catalogued. Now comes the tricky part: Figuring out what to keep and where to put it.

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.

Hiatus 2018

I'll be going on hiatus for the remainder of November. I'm just busy trying to finish my novel in between working.

I'll be back in December with a post-NaNo report.

Putting Things in Boxes

This probably has very  little to do with my NaNo novel, which I have, by the way, finally given a name. Its still-entirely-changeable-but-at-least-looking-like-a-title title is Graver Mistakes, which is from the Coheed and Cambria song "Neverender." I don't know if it makes sense for this story, but we're going with it.

The other day, I was stalling and putting off novelling, and started a list of stories I've written (or at least first drafted), and their respective genres. I'm trying to find my niche, I guess. I want to see if there's something I tend to gravitate towards.

Right now, there are twenty-one stories on the list.

Death and Romance

Yes, I skipped last week. I'm sorry. I had a lot going on. It was all Halloween/beginning of NaNo/having to work on my day off, and I realized sometime on Sunday that I never wrote my post. But that's fine. I didn't have much to talk about then anyway.

So now I'm a few thousand words in, and this story is taking turns I never expected. My initial thought was that Steve was just some hapless oaf who got killed repeatedly in gruesome ways. But now all of a sudden he's a mentally ill grave robber with possible aspirations of being a superhero and I don't know what's happening anymore. Oh, and there's a love interest?

What started as some easy, jokey series of unfortunate events has turned into something else entirely.

Mystical Murder Weapons

Here is my problem when it comes to prep work and anything involving research. I go to look up one thing, and two hours later I'm reading about martyrdom and the Fisher King. That's one of many reasons why it takes me so long to write my blog posts.

I was trying to research the Spear of Longinus (aka the Spear of Destiny, or the Holy Lance). I was trying to figure out what happened to Steve to cause him all the trouble he's about to experience. I'm inclined to think that whatever kills him first has something to do with it.

Night of the Living Steve

Oh, Steve. Poor, poor Steve.

I'm going to murder him. Repeatedly.

The question is, of course, why? I can write his unfortunate demise in fifty different ways, but I need some kind of narrative framework to hold it all together. How has Steve found himself in this situation? Why is this happening to him? How is he going to get out?

Previously, I've said, on at least two occasions, that he's been cursed by an angry god. But unless I do some work and really flesh that out into something, it just ends up being "just because." As in, these things are happening to him because it's convenient for the purposes of story writing. It's not a good reason. And a good reason for him getting into this pickle is going to be instrumental in getting him out. I mean, how do you appease an angry god?