Dispatches From Editing Valley
Rations grow low, but the end is in sight…
Dispatches
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Entry #3 in my ‘Dispatches’ series of updates on personal writing projects.
On July 18th of this year, I posted an update about my most recent WIP, a fantasy novel set in a world I’m also using for a DND campaign with friends.
The project began last November, and here I am, a whole year later…
Still working on it.
It’s been a new, strange experience, quite unlike my first ever novel project (and the WIPs that came in between) so I’m still processing how this project has gone, what implications it has for my overall writing workflow, yadda yadda.
This little post is another update to that effect.
When I posted back in July, I’d just finished my rough draft, hitting about 105k words, which ballooned into over 130,000 by the time my next pass was finished. Yeesh.
It’s now back down to 120,000, and I’m hoping it’ll be closer to 115k once all is said and done.
And I’m close. Tantalizingly close. My mouth waters. My stomach grumbles. I’m so very ready to get some of these chapters out to beta readers, but the day still eludes my grasp.
Like food sliding from your fork in a dream, slipping ghostlike through the tines…
I’d thought it was much closer to finished last month because I was running through my pen and paper pass, a favorite, late-stage part of the process for me that I feel brings ‘new life’ into the reading.
The process goes like this — after making one or two rounds of edits on a chapter-by-chapter basis in Google Docs, I’ll print the whole thing out and take a pen to it, reading linearly and getting a sense for how the thing flows together.
And man, does having a physical copy make a difference. Your brain stops perceiving of the thing as an infinite stream of text, and starts understanding it as a story that flows page by page, chapter by chapter, hour by hour.
With a pen in hand, you have a tangible yet fluid tool by which to cut sentences out or down and move them here or there, all your changes locked in time, rather than synchronous. There’s something about this that changes the process entirely.
Last time I did a pen and paper pass on my WIP, it took a couple weeks of dedicated work (mostly on weekends), and then maybe one or two more 6 to 8 hour workdays to incorporate the penned-in edits, three or so weeks total, maybe.
But that one was only 60,000 words.
With this project, the work seems to slow exponentially, my pen pass taking all of October, stretching into November, in 1-and-a-half to 3 hour increments each morning that felt like carving at a slab of granite with nothing but my fingernails, hoping a David will emerge.
But I also, as always, see a light at the end of the tunnel.
At this point in time, I’ve incorporated edits on around 200 of its 420 pages, have finished work on most of my ‘problem child’ chapters, and just need another 10 to 15 hours of incorporation before I’ve reached my final page.
There’s still one more pass after that, before I think I’ll be ‘finished’ — a grammar, sanity, voice, and tense check (on select passages), that I still suspect will take another 5–10 hours at least.
Even then, I know there will be more work that could be done before I’d call this thing ‘publication’ ready, and, of course, there’ll be whatever feedback beta readers send in, which might be better off sourced now rather than later…
But at this point, I think I’m best crossing that bridge at a later date. I very well could be wrong.
And what comes after this thing?
Well, I have a shelved horror project I could pick up, and several short story concepts I think have some merit, and an album’s worth of songs I’d like to record at some point, and a WWI/Modernism worldbuilding project that I haven’t touched in earnest yet (inspired by Disco Elysium and my recent read of Sabriel, both of which I loved), and I’ve got novel #2 in my current WIP’s series.
So there’s no shortage of things to consider, work to do, fun to be had in the abyssal white vacuum of my next New Document.
But for now, I’ll keep chugging through novel #1 of The Orandreon Cycle: Coalescence. And I’ll let you know once it’s done.
