Skip to main content

In process -- July 2014



First Draft
“Limering”. Around 74,000 words.  Trying to wrap things up.

Editing
“Wind/Water/Salt”. The end really needed a lot of attention. I deleted more words in the last quarter than in the other three quarters combined, I bet. Things seemed adrift, and like I just wanted the first draft to be over, kind of like the second. Which isn’t a good sign, perhaps. Some stats:

  • I started this process with a full read-through of the first draft in January, pen in hand. I began actually editing in February, so the second draft took six months.
  • The first draft ended with 48 chapters, and the second has 45 chapters, even though the second-last chapter got divided in three.
  • The second draft is over 13,000 words shorter than the first, clocking in at 143,139 words, a loss of 8.4%. That’s not quite the 10% I was hoping for, but there are probably three drafts to go (hopefully they won’t take as long) and if I lose 8.4% each time, well, that takes me down to 110,085, which isn’t quite the taget 90,000, but it’s better than just cutting whole plotlines or something. Not that I could.

This is the plot revision draft. It’s much more logical than it was before, at least the way it looks in my head. I’ll let it “rise” for a few weeks, or maybe age or ferment (but not foment), and then read it again and I’ll know. 

Last night I opened the file just to clean up a revised outline, and it didn't look as genius as I'd thought, and I went through a pile of notes to see if I could throw any away (I could!) and found some good ideas that still need to be implemented. I'd like to get back to it, but I'd like to do a few other (small) things first. Short stories! They're like knitting socks. In that they always take far longer than I expect, being so small. 

Connecting
--
Circulating
--
Knitting

 “Kaffeklatsch” (self-designed).  Finished. It was a bit of a death march to the end.
“Ceremonial Armour” (Kaffe Fassett, knit from a photo). Three inches into the first sleeve, I had to make a chart to progress. So it sat for a couple of weeks until one evening I just did it (took about ten minutes, what with counting the stitches, looking at the previous chart, and doing some very rudimentary math). Looking at the colors, I’m not sure I like them, but whatever, I guess it will be so ugly it’s cute.
“St. Anthony’s Ribbon” (self-designed). Finished the first sleeve. Started the body. Fixed the edge chart. This is going to take a while.
Octopodes socks. Knitty Spring 2014. MC is leftovers from Tenney Park (knitty deep fall 2011), with some brown tweed Kroy for the contrast. It works surprisingly well. I was so sick of all those old projects, I just started these one day. The pattern was difficult to follow, or maybe error-riddled, or maybe I’m just not used to following patterns anymore. I'm a third of a cuff and a heel away from having the first one done.

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Best TW feedback ever

Over at the dayjob, SMEs are feverishly trying to get documents back to me all marked up, in preparation for the release that's supposed to happen the week I'm back from VP. Today's best comment: Unfortunately not true. SMEs, they're so cute.
Read more

Moraine

So a couple of days I thought I was done with this short story, and I wrote the last line of the story. I even dated it (that's how I can tell it's over). It was a little long, at 6600 words (I was aiming for 5000). But then I was walking to work, and I thought, "My, that was a lame ending. My endings are all crap." So yesterday morning, I scribbled out the date and wrote a bit more. And this morning I wrote a bit more again, and I dated it and called it done. And still, that ending seemed lame. So a few minutes later, in the last paragraph, I scratched out "the Oak Ridges Moraine" and wrote in "that stupid moraine". Much better. Now I can move on. But in the meantime, I was doing a little research about the Moraine, and I discovered that EGTourGuide lives on it. Only by one or two hundred feet, but I thought it was funny. Good for you, EGTourGuide, with all those excellent plants growing on that substandard soil, where in the olden days (you kno...
Read more

What I read: March 2024

  LHC #240: "Vita Nostra" by  Maryna and Serhiy Dyachenko. Translated by Julia Meitov Hersey. All I knew going in was dark academia. This was a neat thing to read after A Deadly Education last month. The students can leave this school at summer and winter break, but maybe they shouldn't. Also, interesting education method, providing Sasha with a CD player and punishing her if she leaves it in the mode where it plays all the tracks in sequence.  "Norse Mythology" by Neil Gaiman. When I finished Ragnarok by AS Byatt (last month? January?) I was thinking it might have made more sense if I had any knowledge of the subject matter. The boy had left this lying around, and it was not a tough read.  LHC #241: "Science on a mission: How Military funding shaped what we do and don't know about the ocean" by Naomi Oreskes.  I deferred this once because it was so long. History of science is challenging for me to read, because of the need to get a grasp on dispr...
Read more