Wednesday, July 4, 2007

SOS - Doing Swimmingly Well - SOS

Yes, that picture is of me. I made it when the loa of the net decided to turn against me. And yes, that link does lead to an article on Gibson's Sprawl Trilogy because the two subjects are related.

Anyway, on Friday CableOne cut off our internet (read: civilization), even though we paid them six months in advance. Now it's back, and I have returned from the wilds. Rejoice!

To the actual post:
My hands hurt very badly. I think it's a combination of this horrificaly wierd weather and too much typing. Texas, most of the Tri-State area and the Okies are living/swimming in the Second Flood and still the clouds pile up in angry smoke-blue mountains. But! Other than witnessing a spectacular lightning show with earth-splitting thunder in hi-def surround sound, I finished the first draft of XIII!

And now I'm a little overwhelmed. I've established the fifteen most important scenes to the story, but now that I'm revising, I sort of want to curl up in a fetal position. Generally, I work by creating a long list of scenes I want to see in the story. Then I summarize, asking specific important questions. After that, I write the scenes out until I have a workable story line and prose draft. Anybody have any revision techniques or ideas?

Probably by Friday, I'll have a few pictures I've sketched up for the story and I'll post them.

So say we all.
Bri

6 comments:

Unknown said...

Congrats on finishing XIII! Well done :D

My revision advice; put it down for 2 weeks and don't touch it! Work on something completely different. Then come back to it with fresh eyes. You'll be amazed at what you see :)

How long is it? Short, Novella, Novelette, Novel?

Anonymous said...

wait wait, im confused, youre done but you dont have the word count have you already cut that many out and i just missed? well either way that rocks pretty hard core and yay interwebs.

Anonymous said...

Way to go!

P. A. Medley said...

You are so. Awesome.

Joely Sue Burkhart said...

Yay, congrats on finishing that first draft! I agree, give it a few weeks or more to go cold. The distance will help you see what you want to keep and what you want to axe.

Kait Nolan said...

Bravo on the first draft! I find it useful in revisions to storyboard. Write out all the scenes that happen (big and small) on notecards--just simple one line descriptions--and then see if you can rearrange them to have any more impact. Then again I write romantic suspense, so that may be a bit more pertinent to that. :) I'm not sure what XIII is about (I haven't read back far enough yet!). I also find it useful to have two projects going at once, so that when I'm in revisions on one, I still have fresh writing I can do on the other, which keeps me happy. Looks like you're already doing that with Handful of Dust, so hopefully that will help you out!