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Sep. 27th, 2012 02:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
damselfishA few weeks ago a friend mentioned that Harper Voyager was having an open call for spec fic novel manuscripts from October 1 - 14, and asked if I had any manuscripts I could send in. I was just sitting down for Swans at the time, so that's all I'd been talking about and I guess she forgot I'm technically sitting on the second draft of a novel.
"Yeah! I can edit Morgan to send in! A month is plenty of time!"
Oh.
God.
No it's not. I've been hammering away at it pretty much full time for the past three weeks, and I'm coming up to the end, where each day gets harder and harder to sit down and do what needs to be done. I've written a net of about 1,000 - 2,000 words a day, and given that the manuscript I started with was 105,000 and it's now floating around 90,000, that means I've written a lot. How is a net gain possible when overall I've lost 15,000 words? Simple-- I cut out a huge chunk in the morning and then set my word count, and seed in the little bits I want to keep and write the rest of the scene around that. Out of a 3,000 word scene, I may preserve a handful of sentences. So between all the heartless ripping out I do, I'm still mostly writing in new stuff. I don't want to know what a real word count would look like. Scrivener just measures the net, so if I write 50 and remove 40, it says I've only written 10 words. The reality may be double that.
I know all that advice says "don't rewrite, then you can't edit!" But I just spend most of my time rewriting scenes. And yeah, most of them are superior scenes, but I can't help feeling that I'm Doing It Wrong.
I have no idea how authors do this if they have day jobs. Sure, when I say full time I'm probably only putting in 4 - 6 hours of work a day, but that's a lot when you only have the energy for 6 - 8 hours of "doing things" per day (I found out relatively late in life that most people can squeeze much more activity out of themselves than that without burning out, and that I wasn't lazy so much as wired differently). And 4 - 6 hours a day for a month for a third draft? Daaaang.
It's still a zombie baby. Does it reach a point where it stops being a zombie baby, or is that the point where you pass it off to an editor and they clean up the stitching and use make-up to make it look less undead green? I don't really know how "good" it has to be before professionals look at it and perform the surgery I can't do for myself. All I know is I hate it, and my friends who've read the abominable Draft 2 say it's good.
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Date: 2012-09-28 02:25 am (UTC)And I think it's a really good thing I've never heard that piece of advice, because it would not work with my process at all.
I am also cleaning up a MS for the Harper Voyager thing, but I only found out about it a week ago, I have 90k words to get into shape (for a draft 7 with a major change), and of COURSE this is the first time in months I've gotten sick. LIFE.
Good luck!
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Date: 2012-09-29 01:48 pm (UTC)GOOD LUCK THOUGH! That's hardcore. But hopefully less hardcore than draft 3 with major rewriting in a month.
This draft is actually taking longer than the second, though that could be because the second took place while I was in school so I picked at it between classes and didn't feel the time go by like I do now. But wow, after following some professional authors I had no idea editing just... took so long. Of course, they have actual editors and deadlines. The good ones, anyway.
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Date: 2012-09-28 07:35 am (UTC)That's really stupid advice. Rewriting is editing, if what is required to improve the story is rewriting.
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Date: 2012-09-28 12:52 pm (UTC)Also known as; don't listen to writing advice if you're neurotic. It only makes things bad for you.