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The Revision is Launched!
I finished up my most pressing donkey-work on Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland, and am now the proud possessor of:
1) A complete scene breakdown, which I'm using as a template for all high-level revision passes;
2) A story calendar, which is considerably less buggy than I'd suspected;
and
3) A digest of all the political/diplomatic matter in the story, indexed by scene.
This is so that I can plunge into the first set of revisions, namely the ones which make everybody's agendas internally coherent. (In the story, they make sense from the perspectives of the people involved, and evolve over two or three eventful months. In the real world, they evolved over two or three years, and the plans I started writing aren't altogether the same as the plans I brought to a conclusion. Also, I occasionally lost track of some of the multi-decker whoppers the Duelling Diplomats are exchanging in the background. It's all right for the reader to skim that - background, and all! - but not for it to disintegrate when the reader does look twice at it.)
And now I'm started.
This is the one job which I need to get right in order for the story to hang together and make more than impressionistic sense. I'm giving myself a week for it, or at least for the coarse-grained corrections which are all I need to make at this stage. Some good stuff I can't discuss without absolute spoilerificity has already emerged from the shadows in which my subconscious or my good fortune hid it.
I'm expecting to lose a big chunk of wordcount in this phase, as I remove all the repetitious speeches and diplomatic blah in which various characters kept me up to date on what they thought they were up to through different stages of the first draft.
After this is done, the next big job will be the handling of the Big Bad, which links up with the integration of Katy Elflocks and the Great Untold Story. Successively finer-grained stuff after that.
My sinister master plan is to have a submission-ready manuscript by Easter.
Happy New Year, all!
1) A complete scene breakdown, which I'm using as a template for all high-level revision passes;
2) A story calendar, which is considerably less buggy than I'd suspected;
and
3) A digest of all the political/diplomatic matter in the story, indexed by scene.
This is so that I can plunge into the first set of revisions, namely the ones which make everybody's agendas internally coherent. (In the story, they make sense from the perspectives of the people involved, and evolve over two or three eventful months. In the real world, they evolved over two or three years, and the plans I started writing aren't altogether the same as the plans I brought to a conclusion. Also, I occasionally lost track of some of the multi-decker whoppers the Duelling Diplomats are exchanging in the background. It's all right for the reader to skim that - background, and all! - but not for it to disintegrate when the reader does look twice at it.)
And now I'm started.
This is the one job which I need to get right in order for the story to hang together and make more than impressionistic sense. I'm giving myself a week for it, or at least for the coarse-grained corrections which are all I need to make at this stage. Some good stuff I can't discuss without absolute spoilerificity has already emerged from the shadows in which my subconscious or my good fortune hid it.
I'm expecting to lose a big chunk of wordcount in this phase, as I remove all the repetitious speeches and diplomatic blah in which various characters kept me up to date on what they thought they were up to through different stages of the first draft.
After this is done, the next big job will be the handling of the Big Bad, which links up with the integration of Katy Elflocks and the Great Untold Story. Successively finer-grained stuff after that.
My sinister master plan is to have a submission-ready manuscript by Easter.
Happy New Year, all!
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