Angel, Draft the Second, finished

[pjthompson]

I should have finished a few weeks back, but took a couple of weeks off to mope.

There's still plenty of ugly, but I hammered out a lot of ugly. At one point I slashed a bunch of stuff from the abominable chapter five, then added new stuff in, bringing my 120k novel up to almost 123k. I despaired.

But I managed to do quite a lot of butt-kicking in the remainder of the book. The new count: 114,750 SMF, 28 chapters.

And I haven't even done what I call the "grunt and strain" draft (bathroom metaphor intentional) wherein I make every paragraph, sentence, and word justify it's existence and squeeeeze that manuscript down. I'm feeling slightly less freaky and despaired than I did at 123k.

A huge thanks to all my brave betas who read the skanky first draft.

I want to do something new now. I want to work on my new novel. I want to.

Comments

[jmeadows.livejournal.com]

Yay! Good job!


Now go work on the new novel!

[pjthompson]

Thank you! I'm giving myself a day off to look at some short stories, but I'm pretty eager to get going on Venus.

[kmkibble75.livejournal.com]

Woot! Congratulations!

You make me look at my 128k draft with wariness now...

I'm sure the trimmed version is vastly improved though, and given how good it was to start with, that'll be something to see :-) Don;t strain yourself too badly trying to squeeze it down more!

[pjthompson]

Thanks!

You make me look at my 128k draft with wariness now...

Part of that was the old writers' trick of squeezing the paragraphs. I went through the mss. after making all my revisions and any paragraph that had fewer than five words in the last sentence got rearranged and reworded until it jumped up a line or two. The ease with which I accomplished this, in most cases, convinced me that there's still a lot more fat in the language to be squeezed. But I'm not going to kill myself too much.

[kmkibble75.livejournal.com]

You've gotten me into the habit of doing that, too, though not quite with the 5 word limit. I still only do it for 1 or 2 words.

[pjthompson]

It doesn't always work with five, but I figure it's worth a shot, and when it usually works, that's my indicator that more can go when I read through again. But I ain't gonna do that yet. I need to get away from Angel for a bit.

[hollailama.livejournal.com]

YAY! Congrats!! *cheers!*

And I totally enable you to work on your next book. Especially considering what it's about.

[pjthompson]

Thank you! And I'm totally going to allow you to enable me. :-)

[mnfaure.livejournal.com]

Woot! Nicely done, milady.

And now go work on whatever your heart is tugging you towards. :D

[pjthompson]

Thanks. And I love your cabana boys.

[mnfaure.livejournal.com]

I'm rather fond of them myself. Especially the one on the left. ;o)