Out of the Starting Gate

gday gentle readers 

As I indicated last time 2014 has begun and I can now say with confidence begun well. 

When I left off way back in May last year to do other things like web work and travel I had edited 90% of Face (book 2 a.k.a. "The Face of the Goddess") and I was struggling. When I say left off in May, that was the end point, the dummy spit, after the effort had dribbled off from a weekly edit 15,000-20,000 words to only 1000. 

It's hard now to remember exactly why but it was something like this: despite all my spreadsheets, glossaries and maps I had quite literally lost the plot. I had no idea what the story was about, and remember I was editing a finished work, I had no right to be lost.

So how do I cram the essence of my sprawling epic back into my tiny brain after a long break. I have 382 POV changes over the 3 books, call them chapters: Break 152, Face 120, Arch 110.
  
Last time I tried to summarise the events of each chapter in a spreadsheet but it was too slow, too unwieldy I needed both the spreadsheet and the novel open and synchronised. Read and digest the chapter, transfer the gist of it to the sheet. The problem is me, I get carried away with spreadsheets. I divided the chapters into mini scenes, put in columns for 'characters mentioned' and for 'new concepts introduced'. Filling the columns required research; too slow, too hard, too damn stupid for words.      

I'm trialling a new approach. I saved a copy of the trilogy as at 1/1/2014, set it up in outline using 3 levels of headings for book, part and chapter.(Face has 3 parts - the others have 2) Now I simply delete each paragraph that isn't essential 

to the story line 

as I go.  What's left, I cull of needless words and re-arrange as the summary.  This will also serve as an outline for my publishers :^)

The old method took me two weeks to do 24 Kwords. At that rate to summarise the trilogy would take a year, not editing mind just summarising to guide the edit.   

With the method I'm trialling, I did more (27 Kwords) in the first 4 hours.  It's about as fast as I can read and I can already see where changes need to made. Read like this, with an eye for the essence of each chapter, inconsistencies pop out.

addendum

As of this post 20 days later the trial is over I'm using it and have summarised 60% of the trilogy. Book 1 was a breeze, book 2 to date a slog. I've come to the conclusion that little of book 2 is salvageable. (not unexpected all things considered) Cant wait to deconstruct Book 3.       
     
'ooroo until my next post
Rob

   
                 
                 

And so it begins ...

Forgive me gentle readers, for I have lapsed. It has been nine months since my last post.


My trilogy of new year's resolutions, as posted on Facebook to ensure people will remind me, is to write, write  & write.  

(There's 50 words already 52 now 53.)  Sorry about that, I don't intend the writing to be trivial but as always I will count and record progress. I find simply counting and recording what I actually do is reward enough.   

This year however, I won't set word targets. For me Word targets encourage padding, as has happened in all three of my books where I set a target length for each scene, each scene being a new POV, 3 POV scenes to a chapter. Some scenes end up nothing but padding because the scenes POV character had nothing to say or do that made any difference to the story. Word targets were useful when I started but they have outlived their usefulness.

That said I have set a few specific goals for 2014. 

   1. Editing the trilogy will be finished this year - I'm aiming for the 30th June 2014 so I can spend the next 6 months promoting it. 

   2. I will also complete the 4 short stories I had in mind that are set in the universe of the trilogy and precede the events in the novels. They are as much to help me solidify the background to the trilogy.  One is in first draft, another started and the other two mentally planned.  

   3. I will blog the progress - monthly at the very least - I have already reduced my attendance to the writers group to once a month (It's a 45 mins drive both ways -  costly in time and tires). The other Monday nights will reserved for writing / blogging / editing - whichever is top of the to-do list at the time.  
           
Anyhow that's the dream. 

"You gotta have a dream, if you don't have a dream,
How you gonna have a dream come true?"  

            South Pacific - Happy Talk 

and so it begins ... another year, another story.

'ooroo until my next post 
RoB

The story so far

gday gentle readers 

A short end-of-week-14 progress report

   
   I'm now behind editing book 2 and cant see any way of catching up as I'm about to make radical changes to the last quarter of it (about 50,000 words) 

   I will post later about what, when, where, how and why the changes will be made.

   Suffice to say most of it was written just before my transplant when my kidney function was down to 17% and my toxic mind was poisoning my pen  ( er .. keyboard )

   but progress there has been

1. 109% of Break (finished with 9% more than I started )
2. 72% of Face (the current task)
3. 6% of Arch (as I edit what I read to my writers group )

  Trilogy overall 58% 

ooroo until my next post 
RoB