Writing, 9/13

I just got a rejection letter for one of my other stories, so that one will go back into circulation, too. I'm looking at next week to do it, since I'm getting ready to leave for my friend Lisa's wedding on Friday.

(EPIC TRILOGY ALERT) I've been plugging away at the second book in the trilogy over the weekends, revising it, and after I talked with Sugu some about it the other night, I found more trouble spots. Cutting those and all the junk so far, I've cut 55 pages out of the monster. I feel like it's on a diet. So, I'm sure to Sugu's shock, since he's printed it out already, what was 740 is now 685, and dropping. Even if I cut a page out a chapter the rest of the way, that will be around 20 more pages, and 665, 660, that sounds like a perfect length for this book.

Mainly the cuts have to do with exposition. I know Ben said he had this problem too in his story, and even though I never really cared for much explaining in these types of stories, somehow there's a lot of it. I think it's partly due to me just figuiring out what's going on as I go. The most important thing for me is that the world I'm creating in these books feels like it has a history, as opposed to dictating it to the reader. Even if I know all the history, the dates and names, most of it doesn't belong in the book.

I wrote a lot in the Angel Book tonight, Chapter 11, bringing it to 288 pages. It gets even more trippy from here on out, like a good (bad?) acid trip.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Visit From The Goon Squad: Charting New Territory

Image
 Credit - Tessie Girl I recently finished A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan and it's one of the best books I've read in a while.  It flows from one character to another in a kind of narrative relay.  At first it's disorienting and honestly I lost track of who the focus was or was supposed to be - the point, I think - and it required me to stop and start again once or twice.  The book also caroms from one era to another.  This narrative river just flows along and then washes ashore deep in the future, providing a brief, sober glimpse of the fate of the character we follow, before retreating back to the sea of the present.  At some point you almost long for a chart mapping out all these people, these places and times, and then as if on queue, Egan actually depicts an entire sequence of the book in a succession of flow charts.  I wa struck at how effective, and affecting, this was; the PowerPoint slides gradually became thought bubbles, accumulating tension
Read more

Get Lost Writing

Image
Writing for me has always been an act of discovery.  At various times you will feel like Magellan, or Columbus.  Others you will feel like the Donner Party.  You will feel these at varying times throughout the process of writing the same novel, if you're anything like me.  And at some point, you will experience another feeling - the sheer elation of knowing you are the first person to ever lay eyes on this undiscovered country of a novel.  That's the way it feels to me when a novel reaches that tipping point, when the mass is so great that the collapse from dust into light becomes to powerful to deny.  I've felt this feeling before, a couple times.  It's a great feeling.  I feel it now, as I'm 211 pages into the novel that I've documented here recently on the blog (otherwise known as the #scifijohnhughesbook ).  A lot of the disparate threads - fits and starts really - that I've experimented with over the last few years are finally bearing fruit.  This
Read more

Diamonds In The Rough

Happy to announce that my brother and I won the Main St. Waterloo 10th Anniversary Poster Contest, co-sponsored by the Metro Arts Guild . Our piece, entitled "Metamorphisis", is on display at the gallery -- unless it's somewhere else now. I'll try and get a scan of it to put up on the blog (why didn't you think of that before, Darby?) There's a new literary journal out there called A Public Space that could not have started off better. The contributors and bredth of the material really has me excited not just to pick this up, but submit there as well. The coolest thing is they have a new story by Kelly Link. Check out the excerpt . My own zine, Other Than , continues on pace toward completion. It seems like I may be hosting a joint reading at the gallery to launch it along side Osie's Murmur , which would be very cool and exciting. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter made it safely into orbit .
Read more