Hello Gentle Readers, just wanted to keep you up to date as to what I've been doing. Frying my eyeballs doing line edits. Oh. My. God. What a pain in the ass! I got through the first 80 pages with nary a headache in sight. Now that I'm around page 150, I think I need some form of heavy medication to keep my vision from blurring.
I found the trick is to skim the manuscript, not really reading the story, per se, but looking at it from an editorial eye. Yeah, well, my editorial eyes got stuck and fogged, and then I found myself reading the story again. Well, I guess I sort of had to, I'm in the middle, more or less, and I wanted to make sure I didn't have a middle slump, you know. But man, oh, man, I swear, sometimes I just want to give up. I don't know what's worse, writing the book, the query, or line edits. This is so much harder than running a restaurant for 75, doing a wedding for 250, and a dinner for 35 in the upper dining room, at the same time. In the space of three hours, the food is out, drinks are flowing and I can clean up the kitchen and go home. This book isn't going to ever be done, and even though I gave up the booze before my daughter was born, I tell you, I could really use a Southern Comfort Manhatten right about now. With three cherries.
Okay, I also haven't sent out my queries yet, don't want to jinx myself if Donald does want the full tomorrow, lol, I want to be able to give it to him in perfect condition. Which means, I also have to realign my chapters. I cut so much out, now the chapters are all wobbly. But I don't want to do that and line edit at the same time. One thing at a time gentle readers, one thing at a time.
I hope you are having a better weekend than I. However, with only 150 more pages to go, and the ending is pretty tight so I don't think I'll need to do a whole lot with that, I'm hoping to finish tonight, and send out queries tomorrow.
Oh, and by the way, I discovered that I do have a three-act story arc. Pretty cool I think, for someone who's a panster. Sometimes I even amaze myself. And the best part, I've cut another 800 words, so now I'm down to 97K. More or less. TA DA.
6 comments:
Wow. Congrats on the accomplishment thus far! Well done, good lady.
good job!
I actually love doing line-edits, but i can completely understand how they can become overwhelming.
Thank you Thank you I'll take a bow *here* and *here*.
I got a short reprieve, had to go to may parents house for Sunday dinner but now that I'm home, guess where I'm going to be until bedtime. You guessed it. Right here.
Congrats on what you've accomplished so far.
I hope your other line edits go well.
Amazing how a story can work itself out into an organized thing, huh? That's why I'm not a pantster, though. I've discovered that starting out with the organization is just that much faster, albeit not as exciting.
I hate line edits, too, but I wish I was doing them instead of what I'm doing now - staring at big changes for my book. Long story. I know you're going to yell at me because I think it's going to be one or two more months before I send the partial... *runs away*
I'm not yelling at you, I never would,besides I promised I would never mention "that book" again. A promise is a promise and I try never to go back on my word. However, if YOU want to tell ME what happened, I will listen. The only thing I will say is perhaps maybe you should write a certain person a brief note saying you are still working on said project with the hope he is still interested in looking at it. It is the only polite thing to do, I think.
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