caper_est | Before the Second Vision (Reply)

First and foremost, thanks to everybody who has offered comments, encouragement, or simple patience with my constant progress-spamming to my journal over the past couple of years. Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland is probably the hardest project I've ever completed, even in the limited first-drafty sense, and I don't think I could have done it without being able to talk about it a lot to people who were not me. The blogging also made me think twice about everything I'd written, and forced me to understand its successes and failures at a much more conscious level as I went along. This ought to stand me in good stead during the revision process.

Secondly, I'm already starting on the revision reading and planning, and about this I'm going to blog in a slightly different manner. Even if I could do detail without killing spoilery, I can't imagine anybody's finding any entertainment in the tedious technical necessities of the Blue Pencil's Progress. But because talking has proved so good for the work so far, and because this revision is such a big job, I'm going to be offering something a bit different. Taking each layer of revision onion-wise as I hit it, I'm going to take as a point of departure the kind of stuff I need to be doing in it, and write a short essay to get my thoughts in order about what that aspect of revision means to me, and why that sort of change is important and/or dangerous or whatever, and how it relates to the sort of books I actually like to read. Comments will, as ever, be more than welcome - this process is going to be much more about public subjects than most of what I've been posting up until now, and less about my unpublished MS in particular.

We'll see how that works out shortly.

The first question I need to answer, before any others, is the highest-level one possible: Now that the story is finished, what kind of a story is it? Because I'm not the first story-teller, nor will be the last, to write something that has ended up a very different line of yarn to the one they began spinning in the first place.