This was supposed to be a time where I'd be flying through things. The hard work is done; I have a draft of the epic fantasy novel I'm working. Know the beginning, know the middle, and I know how it ends. So I'm in the editing phase. But not just any ol' editing phase, I'm in what I call "the cruise editing" phase.
And just what is meant when I say the "cruise" editing phase. It implies this form of editing SHOULD be a breeze. A regular walk in the park. The hard part's done, you know the structure and where the story is going, now all you're doing is going back over the material looking for errors, which if you don't have any, should make for a nice even ride, like a day at the beach. Like driving past the beach with your arms out just enjoying the breeze.
But though that's where I'd like to be right now, that's not where I find myself. Right now I want to cruise through eveything, but I'm finding error and poors writing galore. If you don't think I'm hard on myself, you sir (or madame) are full of shit! I am. I'm very hard on myself, and my writing. If it's not emmaculate, and doesn't sing, I'm not happy. The problem is, that's final draft, end of the story, ready to be published, bought and consumed writing. It's not writing in process.
One thing that is very humbling about writing is going back over your work and seeing all the errors you make. Grammatical, spelling, scrambled sentences that actually sound better when you move the parts of the sentence arround.
I thought that one you got that "inspiration" and recorded it once that everything was all honkey dorry. Well, if you belive that, then you're not ready for the cold, hard facts of being a writer. A lot of times I'll feel inspired and have a good time of writing something, only to come back to it a couple of days later and find it's litered wtih spelling, gramatical and basic sentence errors. What happened to the inspiration? I thought that covered all sins?
Nope.
A big part of being a writer involves editing past work and making it better. An earned excellence if you will.
And I'm getting sick and tired of slow of progress I'm doing too. Listening to audio playback of your work then dinking around with it eats up the hours real quick. But, my disgust has resulted in some changes.
I'm going to start putting more of an onus on redline editing. That's where you take a chapter, mark it up, type in the changes, THEN listen to it. Bought $170+ dollars of ink for my printer to facilitate that. AND starting next Monday I'm on the hook for two week of jury duty. A guy a work told me to expect a lot of down time being a juror, so I'm hoping to use that time to do redline editing, AND reverse beat sheet breakdowns of the chapters to see how over story logic is. For those out there who aren't familiar with that term, reverse beat sheet, a reverse beat sheet is when you take a chapter of fiction and put it back in outline form highlighting plot points (when key actions happen). Reverse beat sheets are also a useful tool determining what areas of your story need to be cut.
Anyway, I'm working my ass on editing this epic fantasy story. It's still a long ways off, but I am having fun with it.
Really enjoying writing the three love stories in this epic fantasy story. And YES, I am once again daydreaming of Taylor Swift staring as the love interest in the 2nd love story line or maybe a minor mentoring character. But the 3rd love story that blooms beautifully in the 2nd half of the novel is really going to be fun for this rom-com guy to write. Gunna kinda be close to "Romancing the Stone" kind of romance. Lot's of action. Okay, maybe the 3rd romance is more Hans Solo and Princess Leia stuff. But it's going to be good, AND it's going to be unlike any other romance story I've every written. It's already there in the 1st draft, I just need to make it sound and read beter.
So is ol' E.C. Henry in cruise control? Hardly, I'm going full throttle at this thing, baby!
P.S. Sorry about all this Taylor Swift talk. All of that is congecture on my part. I have NO IDEA what she wants to do with the rest of her life. It's just I see her at a critical part of her career. IF she wants to do movies--now's the time! And I had this problem earlier with Jennifer Love Hewitt. For a while I saw her EVERYWHERE in the love stories I had writen in my writing. It was just very easy for me cut and paste her about in my mind. But nothing ever came of that. Sure I sent Jennifer Love Hewitt's production company an elaborate gift box once, but that got sent back to me unopened by them. Likewise all attempts to connect with producer Lynda Obst proved to be unfruitful Once I even bought her an Ipod with all my spec. script soundtracks on it, hoping to win her over with, but at the the event I was supposed to meet either her or a representative from her company, all were a no show and I had to eat that Ipod I bought, to this day it remains unused on my bookshelf. Anyway, my life is filled with disappointment, always has been, probably always will be.
Comments