Monday, January 17, 2011

ROTS update

So it is the 17th January and I thought it was about time I did one of those update thingy’s I am supposed to do far more regularly.

So far, January has been a very productive month. If my name was Stella, you would definitely say I have my groove back. I set myself a target at the start of the year to spend January doing the final edit of my novel. This would mainly consist of 3 areas:

1)      Getting rid of my passive voice and making my prose more active.
2)      Enhancing the motivations of a character I wasn’t happy with.
3)      Finding a way to make a plot point more plausible. Sort of a Meereenese knot if you will.

I figured that in regard to the first point, I have 20 chapters in my novel so if I edited a chapter a day then I would achieve my objective. So far we are just over half way through the month and I am halfway through the novel. “On track sir and with the end in sight, this bugger will not defeat us.” In case you are wondering what film that is from…it isn’t. It just came to me. (If it was from a film, I fear the flick would have been rather awful).

The better news is that I have succeeded in re-writing a chapter or two to sort out the motivation of the character in point 2 above. I have also written one brand new chapter and seriously altered another to make the plot point mentioned above far more plausible. This has been both rewarding and frustrating. Rewarding in that it was good to write some original material again and also meant I could insert an idea I had that I had been forced to cut, frustrating because I do not think the quality of that chapter is up to standard. The content is good but it does not flow. I will address that in a couple of day’s time though. For now, I will plough on with the line by line edits.

Update you all soon.