Camp NaNoWriMo August - Dead Sense

Ever since I finished my zombie story The Fast and the Dead back in February, I’ve been thinking that not only is the title no longer really appropriate but that I’d have to completely rewrite the story. This is doubly true since Camp NaNoWriMo in June, an experience that has taught me a huge amount about longer-form fiction.

So with less than two weeks remaining until Camp NaNoWriMo August, I’ve decided that my August project is going to be that rewrite. I’ll be using the first draft of TFatD as reference material, but I probably won’t have to refer to it all that much. I’ll be taking the core concepts of the story, and the characters, and fleshing both out into something much better. (At least I hope so!)

Gone will be a lot of the empty filler that I ended up writing when I didn’t know what else to write. Probably the most important thing I learned during June’s Camp NaNoWriMo was how to keep all that filler separate from the contents of the book, so with some luck, I should be able to keep it pretty tight.

Editing The Ship of the Unremembered

I think tomorrow will be the first posting of new material from the book. I’ve started recutting sections and arranging them to where they make the most sense from a narrative point of view.

Unlike just about everything I’ve written and posted here before, this book is long enough to have a few different viewpoints represented, so keeping the chronology straight is more of a challenge than I’ve faced before. It’s a fun one though, and I learned a lot about my personal writing process in doing this book. I’m definitely doing another book next month. And I’m definitely pre-planning it this time.

The Price of Demand Edit Saga Continues

I’ve finished working up a final outline for the edit of The Price of Demand. The work I’ve done so far with the dialogue has really helped point me in the direction the story needs to go. A lot of elements I had in there originally are going on the scrap heap, even more than I’d suspected. That’s okay though. They didn’t need to be there in the first place. The new revision of the story should be much tighter and should make far more sense, with motivations that make more sense.

I’m a little sad to make some of the changes. Electrite becomes little more than a footnote in this new version, it’s not really playing a part in motivating anyone besides Altman and Kaylene, who need to keep it a secret. I suppose that’s okay though. It plays important roles later, as regular readers know, and it doesn’t really make sense that it should be central to EVERYTHING that ever happens.

Editing The Price of Demand

Okay then, I’ve resumed reworking The Price of Demand, including the first setup of a new resolution to the story that will make Mitchell less of a Generic Black-Hat Badguy. It’s interesting working on it as pure dialogue, though I expect it to get a little confusing figuring out what exposition goes where when I have to reintegrate it into the text.

Editing With Only Dialogue

Earlier today (okay, sort of yesterday) I posted a revised version of The Price of Demand draft 3, this time with everything except dialogue stripped from it. There’s no context, no description, not even any proper dialogue tags. I simply identify each character before each line.

This is part of an experiment to see if I can make editing a bit easier. I’m hoping that:

• It’ll make consistency of voice easier.
• It’ll make weaknesses in the story easier to spot. (I already know the ending is dreadful and I’ll be rewriting that whole section.)
• It’ll improve dialogue flow.
• It’ll reduce redundancy in the text.
• It’ll help me cut down on exposition.
• It’ll help me show rather than tell.

There’ll be some challenges in doing the editing this way, starting with the fact that I’m forcing myself to work from two documents instead of one. Possibly three documents; I’ve been toying with the idea of a similar exposition-only version as well, though I think that’ll break a lot more than dialogue-only did.

Once I’ve gone over the story as spoken only by the characters, I’ll have an easy way to block out the structure of the story, identify areas where exposition is really critical and where it’s difficult or impossible to convey it through dialogue. At that point I can go back and begin working the exposition back into the story again. I expect this’ll be the most difficult, or at least the most time-consuming part of the process.

Wish me luck!