Still Editing

So I’ve spent the past three hours editing my robert story and I’ve made some decent progress. I’ve found that a lot of my editing has been making lists of certain areas of the story to see where they happen and to make sure it’s balanced and not too much of one part.

The editing has three main things that I need to work on:

1. I have a sub-plot that I don’t know if I should keep or not. I’ve dropped parts of it in the story and I can’t tell if it should stay and get expanded or just be cut.

2. The final chapter needs to be expanded. I have a lot of wrapping up in the final chapter and it happens in only three pages. I think I need to slow it down, expand it and even break it up into 2 chapters if needed.

3. The title. Can I friggin’ think of one already?!!?

On another note, I have no idea what is going on with the blog carnival, so I apologize for no posts this morning. I am going to try to come up with an alternative friday item to post so next week is covered. The always helpful Auria Cortes has given me some ideas, including a ‘Friday Feast’ she participates in.

So that’s it for now. I’m updating the sidebar of the blog to include my new page / word counts and I’m going to edit for another 20 min.

Working on the beast

My procrastination for editing my untitled story came to a head tonight and I finally forewent TiVo and got some much-needed editing done. I’m using a great little program called TaskPaper to keep a running list of items to work on. As I reference an item, I make edits to the list entry and it’s been helping me so far. If you’re looking for a fantastic, yet simple to-do list program, this is it.

I worked for about an hour and a half and was able to get some important items taken care of. First, I deleted all scene changed that were separated by a line in the middle of the page. On 99% of them, I just made a new chapter and on a couple, I just continued the chapter it was on but added another paragraph space, so there are 2 instead of 1.

I had submitted one of my chapters to my writers group a few months ago that deals with a fight between Robert and his nemesis. The chapter got good reviews but my structure and wording didn’t. The biggest gripe was that I opened the chapter with the dictionary’s definition of ‘impact’ and then proceeded to use it multiple times. I can gladly say that I have used the handy search tool to weed out any uses of this word and replace them with other synonyms. I also re-worked the definition style at the top of the chapter. Overall, I think it works better.

So that’s what I got. Another good side to this editing is that the book has actually grown a little! I never thought that would happen, as I believed you only paired down a book during this process, but I stand corrected. I have gone from 123 pages to 127 pages, and from 57,631 words to 57,754 words. I gained 2,000 ‘words’ using the 250 x page numbers method, bringing my ‘word count’ to 63,500.

Overall, a productive evening. Time for home made ice cream and some Chuck on TiVo.