Donna Maree Hanson, Author and PhD Candidate

I’ve got loads of things to do and, of course, I can’t decide what to do first. I did a bit of my uni assignment and not as much as I should have. I am supposed to be drafting an outline for my Nanowrimo project. I’m not certain I can commit to it, but it never hurts to do an outline, I have discovered quite recently. I’ll do that tomorrow.

I had been talking to Nicole about Dragon Wine, lamenting that I had cut a bit but needed to cut more and didn’t think I could get another 20,000 out of it. Then we talked a bit more. I suggested I could cut the bad guy’s point of view. A couple of chapters I had written during revision were from the Inspector’s point of view, nasty stuff too. Nicole said she’d done a twitter survey suggesting that readers don’t like the bad guy’s point of view. I figured I could live without it, but I’ll have to do a bit of patching to make the ending sensible. I can’t all be interpreted from the action. Actually, writing the bad guy helped me flesh out a few things. Now I’ve done that I can get rid of it.

Then I revisited a scene, which I thought I’d cut back, only find heaps of things to cut back. I had way to much detail and the action was full of words that didn’t need to be there. I was quite surprised really. Not only could every second sentence could go but just about every second word, or at least it could be written tighter. So I played with that scene and began to worry that maybe I had quite a bit of work to do.

So the MS is now at 141,500 words. I have 11,500 words to do before I reach my goal. I’m beginning to think it is doable.

I used to think Dragon Wine was the best thing I’d ever written. Now I’m thinking this is the best thing I’ve ruined through overwriting. Well that is repairable.