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December 04, 2003
editing tricks
I tried to go to bed early, honest. But Chapter Four was so close to being done, and I ended up coming downstairs and finishing it. It's the first appearance of Sudja. Yay!
I'm now further along than I've ever been on this iteration of the story. I think Chapter Five is where More Stuff Happens, but we'll see. The book will go at its own pace for now. Plenty of time to tighten up later, when I have it finished and some perspective.
And that's the answer I meant to give you, Mark W., but then we wound up doing forward rolls, and I didn't have a chance to go on and on and on. I plug on, then I toss it in a drawer for a while, I go to several weeks of aikido or I bake a cake or I make a batch of soap or I do whatever, and then I go back and look at it. That's how I edit. Put distance between me and it.
Also, read it out loud. Word by word. That's a great way to find problems with dialogue and sentence structure. Would you believe I read every chapter of my first book out loud before sending it off to the publishers? Yeah. You can see how much THAT helped. ;)
But I think it did. It still sucked, but it sucked at a higher level.
Looking forward to Chapter Five. No aikido tomorrow night, unfortunately. Still ill, tired, and unable to do much of anything but climb in and out of bed, tap on a keyboard, and amuse cats with my slack-mouthed drooling.
Posted by sdshaver at December 4, 2003 02:11 AM