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.
Yay you! You can do it!
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I’m sure it’ll work out fine, probably. But still, this is the first thing that leapt to mind, even if it likely doesn’t properly apply:
That is very funny. It does feel like that.