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[05 Nov 2004|12:43pm] |
More editing. ::grumble grumble:: I'm at least half way through it now, but the number of changes I've made is staggering. Every page is full of red ink and there are arrows shooting all over the place redirecting huge blocks of text and reordering paragraphs. I'm starting to get scared I might over-edit the book. There's definitely a fine line between polished and too-polished; you don't want to leave the writing too rough, but you don't want to polish it so that it looses its grain and texture. I think the first 3 chapters are currently suffering from "over editing", because they're the oldest and have been revised 3 or 4 times already. There's really no way to address that, so I hope it's not bad. In any case, I'm going easy on the last 4 chapters.
I've started thinking about changing the structure of the book. Currently it's written in "acts" which is invariably how I write everything -- big chunks of writing broken into small chapters. The 7 acts I've got are great, but the smaller chapter size is starting the hurt the book. There are some places where I reach the end of a scene and try to leave that part of the story altogether. But since the next chapter literally starts about 2 lines under the end of the last scene, sometimes, without that "blank page" effect to cut one chapter off from the next, you miss the switch. A few times I've felt like my lead-ins aren't working, but the truth is that having run-on chapters just doesn't fit with the style of the book. Perhaps I need to take a more conventional approach and bundle the book into longer, more consistant chapters. (There are, after all, forty chapters in this book so far.)
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_warsaw