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

[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.