Hi all,
My writing/editing/reading/critiquing output failed to increase much last week, even though I had overcome the flu and conjunctivitis, as I spent most of the week trying to catch up on other things. It was good to swim again and lift some weights, I really felt lethargic and semi-useless when not doing them.
I finished editing chapter five of "Stalking Tigers". Probably a better description of what I am doing is writing a second draft as I am cutting out 2000 or more words a 5000 word chapter and then adding in somewhere around 2500 new words. I am making so many changes to each chapter that I then need to go over it again and edit it. Chapter five ended up 500 words longer then it was originally.
One of the reasons for all the changes is that I had tended, in the early chapters at least, to have the main character despair too much over his situation. I have cut back on this, making the character more pro-active, and hopefully letting the reader despair for him. I am making him a more resilient character, one who clicks into scientific mode faster and uses his intuition to attempt to solve his dilemma. Before he spent too much time, I felt, coming to terms with his situation. The coming chapters show him struggling with his situation, so I don’t need to overemphasis it in the first few chapters.
Tim Winton spent most of his Miles Franklin acceptance speech criticising the Productivity Commission's suggested changes to Australian copyright law. He pointed out that Breath was published in May last year and under the proposed changes his Australian publishers would now have to compete against non-GST taxed imported versions for which Winton would receive little or no royalties.
I did the first reading of a short story for critters that had so much wrong with it that I would have spent hours writing the critique. The writer would have offended half his potential audience with his offensive portrayal of women as little more than sperm catchers. Unfortunately, when I got around to writing up the critique, I only had less than an hour until the critter's deadline, so the writer will have to do without my criticisms.
I hear thunder in the distance, bye.
Graham.
A blog about writing, science fiction, the future of publishing, books, and me.
2 comments:
My MC mopes a lot too, Graham. I'm trying to persuade her to do less thinking and more doing but not having much success yet:-)
I think the last book in the Chronicles of Thomas Convenant convinced me that too much time in a character's head, too much indecision, can make a story very slow to read.
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