Well, so much for weekly posting. If I'd kept a running diary of my last couple of months of activity on The Muse, it would have looked something like this:
Week 1: Editing.
Week 2: Editing.
Week 3: Family Crisis.
Week 4: Work Crisis.
...and repeat. Not terribly interesting.
That's not to say the time hasn't been productive. I fixed a lot of annoying little problems, and with the help of my reviewers, identified areas of ambiguity in the story line, inconsistencies in some of the characters, and a couple of spots that didn't do much more than slow the story's pace and needed to be cut down and tightened up.
My biggest fear at this point was running into something that was so screwed up that I would have to do a major rewrite. Fortunately, that didn't happen. There was some clunky dialogue, and a few scenes that weren't focused well enough, and a little-girl character who needed to do a better job of acting her age, but nothing that required extensive meddling with the structure of the story. So, after all the dust has settled, I've got something close to a final draft of the manuscript, though I know we'll be tweaking it all the way to publication.
Now it's back over to Grace, and I'm sure she'll identify some opportunities to tighten up and polish the story even more. In her early feedback, she had some recommendations about strengthening the spiritual element within the story and handling the climactic scene near the end, and I hope I've answered the mail on both those issues.
Week 1: Editing.
Week 2: Editing.
Week 3: Family Crisis.
Week 4: Work Crisis.
...and repeat. Not terribly interesting.
That's not to say the time hasn't been productive. I fixed a lot of annoying little problems, and with the help of my reviewers, identified areas of ambiguity in the story line, inconsistencies in some of the characters, and a couple of spots that didn't do much more than slow the story's pace and needed to be cut down and tightened up.
My biggest fear at this point was running into something that was so screwed up that I would have to do a major rewrite. Fortunately, that didn't happen. There was some clunky dialogue, and a few scenes that weren't focused well enough, and a little-girl character who needed to do a better job of acting her age, but nothing that required extensive meddling with the structure of the story. So, after all the dust has settled, I've got something close to a final draft of the manuscript, though I know we'll be tweaking it all the way to publication.
Now it's back over to Grace, and I'm sure she'll identify some opportunities to tighten up and polish the story even more. In her early feedback, she had some recommendations about strengthening the spiritual element within the story and handling the climactic scene near the end, and I hope I've answered the mail on both those issues.
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