Ooo, that hurts

Working on the deeper cuts that I outlined last week, and man I'm really taking out stuff that feels precious. But, it's not present action and it's not strictly necessary background, so little by little it's all coming out. This is stuff that I dreamed up and wrote at the very beginning and that feels like the DNA of the book. It leaves me a little breathless to highlight it and hit the delete button.

I finished one chapter and I got SIX pages out vs. my goal of five. Down to 407 total. That actually took me two sessions. I took a shot on Saturday with some spare time and got up to a certain point in the chapter with a lot of background material. I got stuck at that point, depressed and sure I'd never wrangle this book into shape. But--one of the benefits of insomnia--a solution came to when I was laying awake that night. A soul-shaking solution since I suddenly realized that a favorite little episode would have to come out. I did that and a little more this morning.

So, on to the next chapter. If the pattern holds I won't get one-per-day done. Maybe if I can work some this p.m. and discover the next problem, I can sleep on it tonight and keep on schedule tomorrow.

The urge to work on line editing is still with me strongly every day. I can feel myself getting close to the end. I feels like just a little bit more revision like I'm doing now before I finally go to the line work.

Another big distraction starting up--baseball season--a daily temptation to tune in an afternoon game and a nightly temptation to stay up too late wearing out my eyes. Today is supposed to be the Red Sox opener but it's already rained out, so I get this afternoon back anyway. That mean's a double header distraction some other day.

More fixes--plan for more cutting

I put in an extra session yesterday afternoon doing some clean up that didn't require a lot of concentration and my usual a.m. session today tackling some of the tougher issues. I hope I'm not just kidding myself out of fear and fatigue, but the fixes turned out not to be that tough. Just a quick snip here and there in those scenes and it seemed all better.

Next I want to work on length a little more. Out of the 19 chapters, there are 4 that are especially long. They are probably just too long by any standard and they are definitely enough longer than the other chapters that it gives an imbalanced feeling. So next week I think I'm going to go through those chapters one at a time with a goal of getting another 5 pages out of each one. They will still be the longest chapters, but they won't blow the curve. I'm not sure how I can cut them that much though. I've certainly cut everything obvious and much more than I really wanted.

Along the way I'll handle some of the smaller cleanup issues and that should end this round of edits, ahead of my target of April 15.

Even that won't end the cutting, but the rest I plan to get out of close line editing in the next round of edits. Instead of cutting whole scenes, it will be tightening by one phrase and one word at a time. I'm really looking forward to that.

Minus 125 pages and Done!

The last few chapters went a lot faster than the muddled middle. I've input all the changes. Here's the final tally:

-From a starting point of 539 pages, I cut 125 pages total and now stand at 414 pages in typescript. That's a cut of approximately 23 percent.

-In printed form, that would be (using the conversion I figured out a few weeks ago) reducing from a starting point of approximately 434 pages to 340 pages currently.

-Word count stands at 123,600 words. Wow. That's shorter than my first draft. I must have less narration and a lot more dialogue in there hogging up white space with fewer words. That's down from 163,700 words in the previous draft.

All of that is on target for the goal I had for this draft, and I'm a lot more comfortable with the shape the book is in, but part of my has the hunch that it ought to be about 40 typescript pages shorter. In terms of word count, I'm 25% over my original concept for the book. Not sure right now how to decide if there's really a problem and if so how to approach it.

Next up . . . I'm going to stew on it. I'm not going to call an official end to draft six for a little while. There is at least a few days of clean up I need to do and maybe more. I'm trying to get it in shape for my next reader and, as before, I want to make handle everything I can think of before I impose on anyone else. I'm going to let it sit for a few days while I catch up on real life and then start the clean up work sometime next week.

Minus 121 pages--almost done

I cranked through two chapters this morning and have only two left, which I'll try to finish this afternoon.

The doc stands at 418 pp. now, which is minus 121 from the starting point. Somewhere my counts got screwy because I'm already well over my estimate for the total.

Minus 106 pages through Ch. 12

Whew. Getting exhausted. Spring break came at exactly the right time--when I'm in the mood for putting in long days exclusively on the book. It's just brute force at this point, putting in the edits. Very little intellectual attention involved so I can put in a lot more hours.

Like I expected, the last chapters of Part 1 (8-10) were done, but I had forgotten about some pending changes in the start of Part 2 (11-12). I ended up tackling that this afternoon so I would still be set up the way I wanted for tomorrow and it was a little time consuming.

Like I say, the page counts are all screwy now that I'm in to this part of the book. Counting all 5 of these chapters (8-12) I'm now up to minus 106 pages off the 539 pages I originally started with. It stands at 433 pages now. I'm past the areas with the biggest cuts, so it's just dribs and drabs from here on. I'll end up in the neighborhood of 120 pages cut when I finish this, which will be I don't know when. I need to put in some time planning my classes for the second half of the semester.

Minus 70 pages--done with Part 1

Put in a long morning inputting the changes on two chapters -- 6 and 7. Easier work than yesterday.

That cut out 13 and 11 pages respectively, one more than my estimate, so I'm up to 70 pp. total cut from Chapters 1-7, about three more than my estimate.

After this it will be harder to track because I'm getting into the areas where I have already input the changes and where I chopped up chapters and moved them around. I'm pretty sure I don't need to do anything else with the rest of Part 1--formerly Ch. 8 and now Chs. 8-10. And I don't think I need to do anything with the opening two chapters of Part 2. This afternoon I'll confirm all that and set myself up to start on Chapter 13 tomorrow. If so, that will add about 30 pages to the tally of pages cut I think.

Minus 46 pp. through Ch. 5

I put in an extra a.m. session today (spring break dividend). Made the changes on Ch. 5, which reduced it by 9 pages, versus 7 estimated. So I'm up to minus 46 and slightly ahead of my overall estimate.

It hurts though. I block out the text and can't believe what I'm seeing--I'm really getting rid of that episode, that character? Click, and it's gone. (Well, it's saved for posterity in other files of course.) One of the episodes I cut this afternoon was almost the very first thing I wrote two years ago when I was first noodling with this project. It still goes with where the story has evolved, but it's not essential. It slows down the pace, and when you stand at 463 pages, pace takes priority over color.

It was a lot of work today. If tomorrow is no harder and I finish two chapters--6 and 7--I'll really be done with Part 1 since Ch. 8 was one of those odd chapters I took care of before. I can skip forward several chapters after that.

Minus 37 pp.--made up ground

Made the changes on Ch. 4 this a.m. A projected cut of 11 pp. turned out to be 14 pp., so I made up the lost ground from yesterday. 37 pp. total cut in the first four chapters--right on track.

It was a long session of attentive work and ended up taking more energy and time than the chapters yesterday. I think my editing notes got less precise along here during the read-through. I had to do a lot of problem solving this morning.

I'm going to try another chapter this afternoon. I have to be careful not to get so carried away that I neglect to plan my classes for next week. One of these days I'll have to take some time away from the novel.

Minus 23 pages

I put in a third session this late afternoon, inputting the changes on Ch. 3. I'm in the mood to keep cranking through.

I'm minus 23 pp. now, which is 4 short of my estimate. I wanted to be at least minus 27 by this point. Ch. 3 is likely to have the most cuts of all. 19 estimated. 16 actual.

My estimates are off because I tended to undercut all the little notes that add new text in.

Minus seven pages

I input the changes on the first two chapters today and it was the equivalent of 2 working sessions, which I could afford because it's spring break. Perhaps I'll make a big push this week. I think the typical working day during this process is likely to be only 1 chapter per day.

My pencil estimates for these two chapters had me at minus 8 pages and my actual was minus 7. So I'm down to 502 pp.

However (really being obsessive, I know) I essentially gave away two new pages by creating two new chapter breaks, splitting each of Chs. 1 and 2 in half. I potentially would have been down to 500. Those new chapter breaks are not going to be definite. More on that another time when I think it through. For now I'll keep referring to Chs. 1 and 2 in the same way.

On to Chapter 3 tomorrow.

Snip snip

Read through the next-to-next-to-last chapter this a.m. and mostly made minor edits until I came to the final scene--8 pp. of beautiful writing leading up to an encounter between two characters that had been the whole original point of the chapter when I first drafted it almost 18 months ago. And it occurred to me that the scene is no longer necessary. I could easily cut it and in fact probably should. It slows down the emotional momentum, and the next-to-next-to-last chapter is a pretty stupid place to do that.

But I don't WANT to cut it!

Radical revisions

First of all, I need to put the time line out of my mind. It's arbitrary and it's making me unnecessarily anxious. Just do the work that needs to be done. It's going to take awhile--longer than I want and longer than I'm predicting. Just keep plugging away a little bit every day.

I'm considering and am probably going to make some significant revisions unlike any I've made before--splitting a couple different chapters in half and moving one of the new resulting chapters to a whole different section of the book. Experienced writers would probably think that's no big whoop--happens all the time--but I have successfully avoided that kind of untangling and shifting so far.

This is coming out of problems with Chapter 12 (f/k/a 13). I've known the problems were there all along but I thought a lot of fancy writing would disguise them. I even put them on a to do list in this blog last month at the start of this revision. The third item, which I've focused on mostly, was cutting down the length. But the first two items were to set up a big part of the plot complication earlier instead of dumping it on the reader all at once near the end and to establish one of the minor characters better early on. I haven't really dealt with those issues.

Those are problems with a lack early in the book. A related problem in Ch. 12 is that there is a sudden excess of stuff late in the book--exactly the stuff needed earlier. Ch. 12 is from that minor character's POV, making him more developed and revealing a lot of plot complication that only he has access to and can report to the reader. It does important work but it does it so late that it feels weird.

So in a way, the solution is relatively straightforward--move that chapter earlier. The material feels less weird that way and satisfies that problem of what is lacking earlier. I've resisted that though because every thread is interwoven with several others. There are present action events in Ch. 12 that need to happen at that late point in the story. How to keep those present action events there and move the other stuff?

It's helpful that a lot of the plot complication stuff--and the stuff that develops and humanizes the character--is not present action but is background and flashback. Those aspects of Ch. 12 snap out of there relatively easily.

Not easily, but relatively so. I've resisted because it's hard, but I think I see a way to do it. That's what I was stewing on and making notes about yesterday and today. The basic idea is this. Pull the "past action/flashback and exposition/character sketch" stuff out of Ch. 12, leave the present action stuff where it is in Ch. 12, break Ch. 8 in half, insert the material from Ch. 12 in that break, resulting in a new Ch. 9 and 10 to conclude Part 1, and write a lot of new material to frame up these elements. For example in this new Ch. 9 I would need a new present action episode to justify going to this character's POV for awhile.

Another side benefit of this is that it gives a more elegant solution to some of the problems in Ch. 8 that I dealt with a couple weeks ago. That chapter was way too long in raw terms and it awkwardly covered a longer period of time than other chapters and awkwardly joined more than one setting whereas most chapters typically center on one setting or theme. This way, I break it up along those two settings so they more resemble the other chapters in length, time frame and thematic unity.

Well, all of this is a lot of speculation. I have notes on it and have drafted some possible new framing material. But I have to get the electronic version in front of me similar to what I did with Chs. 9-11 last week and start cutting and pasting and see if I can patch it together the way I'm imagining. It will involve a lot of new writing, which is intimidating because I really want to be moving forward to line editing by this point, not backward to story development stages.