Sunday, January 15, 2012

Racing through revisions

Wow, so when I said I thought revising A Broken Race would go quickly, I was right! It's done. Granted, that's about all I've been doing for the past few days, but I've really enjoyed getting back into these characters and the story again. Having only spent 30 days with them before, and that, a couple years ago, I was surprised at how much depth of character I'd crammed into 50k. Darn it, I even made myself a little teary a few times.

Since I've been plowing through NaNo rough drafts, I thought I'd share a few faults I keep finding.

• I do not use contractions. There must be some subconscious 'it counts as two words instead of one that way' thing going on.

• I repeat myself. I rephrase what I've just written, sometimes right after saying it. I get stuck on a particular thought and go at it until I've achieved total anvil status. Sometimes I rephrase a thought several sentences later. It makes for some confusing clean up work. I had to go back again and again to keep those spots straight and it got confusing. Hold on, didn't I just say that?

• I change people's names. In this year's NaNo novel, Nervo became Neko. In A Broken Race, Miranda became Emelda, and Violet who was dead twenty years suddenly was reborn. Oops! I do make notes as I'm writing, but its the secondary characters that sometimes miss out on being included in my orderly efforts.

• Consistancy. There's twelve women. Yet, there are more like forty of them. It was morning, now its suddenly night. When did that character get clothes on? He's only wounded a little. No wait, he's almost dead!

For you fellow CC folks, A Broken Race will be going up for critique very soon. Please feel free to tear into it as I know you love to do.

3 comments:

  1. I've got the repeat thing going too. I've caught myself saying the same thing three times in the book. I guess it's something I really wanted to say, and thought I hadn't put it in yet. That's the brutal part, keeping all that straight.

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  2. I tend to repeat myself too. And in my current round of revisions I've spotted lots of places where I should use contractions but didn't. This is now working in my favour, because I'm on a mission to strip unnecessary words out, so every contraction contracted reduces the word count :)

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  3. Glad to know I'm not the only one with repetitius. :)

    Funny how we feel so accomplished by how many words we have in a story only to feel equally accomplished later by weeding them out. Writing is such twisted entertainment.

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