Friday, October 3, 2008

Pretty and Pretty Hard

Another night spent editing the old short story… And guess what? I actually like it now. Hooray!

I cut it down below 7,000 words (I’m thinking 6,000 just isn’t feasible for this one) and chopping those 3,000 words out is much like cleaning a dirty window so you can see the view. The sight was always beautiful, but you had to get rid of the gunk to really see it. That’s how I feel about this story.

It’s endearing to me. A story about familial love that doesn’t come from who you’re born to, but rather who loves you your whole life. It’s a great feeling when one of your favorite stories is one you actually got to tell.

So, anyway, I’m down to the fine tuning of it and I’m realizing from all the work that’s gone into this edit that editing a 100,000 word book is going to be long and exhausting. The only positive note is I don’t think my rough of the book is as rough as the short story was. It was a ROUGH rough! Wordy is probably the best description for how it used to look. .

But with that problem cleared up, I’m optimistic about it’s odds for publication. You just can’t hate this story unless you don’t have a heart :) My grandmother wanted me to continue the story and turn it into a book, which I just couldn’t foresee, given the ending it has, but I realized tonight that five or six years down the road in the MCs life, a real adventure would likely happen.

And it’s all set up in the short story…

I love it!


Edit: Here’s me and my number game again…

Scenes Words
Swim / Bus ............ 765
Home 1................. 948
Professor .............. 981
Crazy Bell 1 ......... 1,037
The Pier ............... 534
Cousins .............. 1,254
Crazy Bell 2 ........... 504
Home 2 ................ 913
Totals: 8 scenes / 6936 words

I can hardly believe that I got eight scenes to fit in under seven thousand words.

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