Revision from the Coffee Room

[caper_est]

This morning I found myself returning to Killer-Kate for the first time in ages, and with a very modest 180 words getting over the summer's big hump.  This evening, even fewer words will complete the Wassail arc, leaving me with two things to do next:

1) Look again at the whole story to date, remove all the matter that now turns out to be extraneous, and re-shape and recolour the remainder so it is of a piece again.

2) Plan out the next arc, the Rising, and look again from it to the prospect of my long-planned ending.

These will inevitably be mixed together.  On one level, this is just a question of knuckling down to a kind of work I hate - namely the extensive revision and resplicing of dense, bindweed-tangled vines of story into something more than a merely barbered version of an indifferent first draft.  But if, as I suspect, this professional necessity is a chief culprit of my recent drought of inspiration, maybe that's a sign that I've been envisioning it as something it can't be.

Perhaps rather than slogging through the vines, what I should be thinking of is taking a brisk stroll through my world in an uncommitted waking dream, until the too-familiar prose matter of the first draft reveals itself anew to me in flashes of vivid Mooreeffoc, and the uncanny truth of the story I ought to be writing emerges from the shell of what I have just happened to have written so far.  At any rate, that's my game plan for getting out of this latest neck of the woods.

I need to get the important things right before I start, because the Rising is the kind of section that it's very hard to imagine writing slowly or contemplatively when once I've got into it.

Here goes something...