Two Hours to Perfection!
Wed 2005-03-30 14:40:56 (in context)
- 51,570 words (if poetry, lines) long
- 39.75 hrs. revised
Pardon the late blog on this subject, but life's been a lot like that lately. Late to everything. Taxes, paying the bills, blogging about stuff. You know.
Sunday night I decided to grab an excerpt from this novel and enter it into the Absolute Write Idol contest. What's that, you ask? Why, it's a combination of Absolute Write and American Idol, of course! If you are unfamiliar with the former, then for goodness sake, click the link. If you are unfamiliar with the latter, I can't help you; my TV stays pretty much locked on Cartoon Network.
Anyway, I entered. I also put the same excerpt on my Novel Excerpt page, but, that being subject to change without notice, I've linked to the relevant post at the AW Forum.
So I got a whole 4.25 hours logged on Sunday, at least two of them because of my efforts for the contest. And in those two hours I didn't progress through the novel at all, but I can at least say that 1000 almost-perfect words got polished into a gleaming 700 word gem of perfection. So, nyah.
(Some say, "If you keep on at this rate, it'll be months until you're done with the novel! Being done is better than being perfect, right?" But, hey, Delacorte isn't accepting submissions until October. I have time. And I believe in avoiding repetition. The result of one time through the manuscript should be a near-perfect, submission-ready manuscript (submission-ready after one last read-through for typos, anyway), not a manuscript that needs yet another full revision cycle.)
The excerpt I used came from Chapter Two, which was a beast of a chapter to revise. It's full of dialogue. Dialogue is one of my strong points, but each bit of it needs to work triple-time. This is true of short stories, too: dialogue advances plot, reveals character, and can be used to slip the reader bits of back-story. The thing about dialogue in the early chapters of a novel, though, is there's a lot of back-story that's relevant, and there's a lot of plot coming up, and there's a lot more character complexity on display. (Did I say "a lot"? I mean A LOT!) So each sentence that each character spouts, however casual and natural I may end up making it sound, has to be carefully scripted. This is why, after 39.75 hours of editing, I'm barely half-way through Chapter Three. (Chapter Three is also full of story-advancing, character-developing dialogue.)
It's OK, though. I mean to keep at this 2-hour-a-day schedule for the foreseeable future. Or at least continue trying to adhere to said schedule, with hopefully more success as time proceeds. The novel doesn't have to be done by March. It just has to be 50 hours closer to done.
That said, I have 10-and-a-quarter hours yet to log by tomorrow night. So we can safely assume that today and tomorrow will rate somewhat more than two hours each.