I said earlier that I didn’t want to spend all of July working on this rewrite. And so I haven’t. I still have two days left. 🙂
In all, I removed roughly 4K from the manuscript, or 20% of its length. That’s a pretty significant excision, and almost all of it from the opening pages. Unlike some other cutting work I’ve done, this one hurt a lot coming out. You see, I had good reasons for writing those scenes–introducing all the major characters, establishing important relationships, setting up future conflicts–so it was damned difficult to make the story work without them. I’m not sure there isn’t at least some noticeable scarring, but I feel the benefits outweigh the negatives. The story now starts where it should, and I think the ending works a bit better.
And I am quite frankly sick of looking at it–a sure sign that I’m done.
Up next, something new. I have no idea what it is yet. I’m doing that Halloween contest thingy over on Codex again. Given my schedule for August, it seems better to work on a short story rather than jumping whole-hog into the novel rewrite. I will, however, begin the note-making process for the upcoming Petra revision. This means I will finally be looking at the comments from my beta readers, which I have been holding at arm’s length until ready. Now I get to see just how mean
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really is. 🙂
In other news, here’s something I should have mentioned last week: in case you haven’t heard, IGMS is now a SWFA pro market, retroactive to the first issue. This means that my recent sale to them will be my elusive third SFWA-qualifying sale. Coolness! (You’ll notice that Edmund, in his announcement, says he’s only bought two stories over 10K words. Mine is one of them. Pardon me while I swell with pride . . . )
(Hey, at least I’m not whining. For once.)
Write Club updates:You know, I’m rethinking the practice of posting the details of my rejections here. It’s something I’ve been doing on a private discussion group for years. But this is a public forum, and that changes things. It occurs to me that I’m coming a little too close to doing what this person is doing. And I never intended this to be anything remotely resembling that. I think that person’s an idiot.
I still see some value in logging one’s rejections. Hey, we all get them. We all get a lot of them. They come with the territory. So I’ll keep reporting them, but from now on, names will be redacted.
Toward that end, two rejections last week: a tier one rejection for “Friends in Low Places” and an encouraging note on “Take This, and Eat.”
Enough. Gotta roll.
