As you can judge from the progress bar, the editing process is well underway. I’m currently almost done with the first act, so I get an idea about the editing process and how I’m doing it.
First, I’ll say that I don’t think this editing process is doing what I intented it to be : I had thought that this phase would result in a shrinkage of the wordcount and give me a leaner, yet better manuscript. Well, guess again. At roughly the quarter mark (100 pages / 437), the manuscript has inflated 1k words instead of shrinking 3k! This is because, while I did manage to cut out some fat (including almost a full quarter of a chapter that was unnecessary), I had to include some missing items : some attribution tags and some actions inside the dialog. So, despite what I thought, the manuscript is now (hopefully) better than before, while being longer. This probably means that I’ll need another round of editing to do the massive cutting this novel seriously needs. Ok, I pitylessly squashed the adverbs, but I need to cut out entire passages, I think.
Right, I managed to insert some notes along the way like “do we need to keep this?”, so next time, I’ll know exactly what to cut. I do find that while I’m reading the stuff, I usually can’t find much wrong with it (except typos and some punctuations) : there is something seriously wrong about my internal editor, I can tell, this book is nowhere as good as that. I hope that by the end of this round, I’ll get to be able to cut out more of my writing (and not say to myself “hey, it’s work you’re cutting out!”), otherwise, I’ll end up taking way more time to edit than to write. Some figures here : I write usually 1k word per day, and each chapter is between 2 and 3k. My editing is currently done at a pace of 1 chapter per session, so one pass should take between half and a third of the writing time. That means that in order to keep my one year deadline, I cannot do more than 3 drafts.
Done with the editing part of this post.
For the other part, I’ve been listening to the “Superstars writing seminar” : succesful authors speaking about the industry. Not much there about the craft itself (well, I have WritingExcuses for that), but a goldmine of information about the economics of writing and such. I can’t say that I agree with all that’s been told (especially in the e-publishing lecture), but it was most interesting. The price is a little high (especially if you take the DVD version instead of the MP3) and the delivery price is way too high (thank you, UPS…), but it was worth every penny (see how I tend to think in british terms?). Definitely cheaper than having to go to Pasadena for 3 days and go listen to these guys live. I hope all this information comes in handy if I ever get published : I now know what sections of a contract to look for, what are the standard rates, and all, so overall, good investment.
Last, but not least, I feel like the ideas for the next book are finally starting to settle : I had some ideas a few months ago about setting end a couple of weeks ago, I got the main concept down. Yesterday, (out of the blue), I started to write a page in the main character’s voice, explaining his situation. This chunk of writing felt very natural : I don’t know why, but for this, I wrote in first person, present tense. As I said a few times, I’m going to try outlining for this book and I found that in order to force myself to outline, this book would be a mystery book, as I don’t know of any other way to try a mystery than outlining. So, I’m writing a mystery, and naturally, I do this in first person, present tense. That’s interesting, don’t you think? Ok, the first person maybe a little cliché (“It was a dark and stormy night”-style), but I think it works for this genre. The character (I still don’t know him that well : I only wrote about half a page of concept in his voice) seems to be quirky, so maybe I can do some humor (or satire even) in this book. Should be fun to try.
That’s all for today : tomorrow is monday, I’ll have my new podast. Yeah!
