Physical Prepping for Conventions

What I worked on:

1007 words on Circus in the Bloodwarm Rain, although I really need to start going back and making some of the early parts make more sense. Right now there’s an awful lot of leaping about between the original short story it’s based on (news of that coming soon) and the final outline for the novel.

1005 words on Prairiedog Town (working title)

Total wordcount: 2012, but there’s still time to get a little more in

Today’s new Spanish words: la abeja (the bee), cienca ficción (science fiction), mamar (to suck, as it mother’s milk), el mamon (a kind of fruit), el lavavavillas (the dishwasher), el rastro (the flea market).

We walked down to the farmer’s market in the morning and bought lovely fruit, including bananas and rambutan. After some work in the afternoon, we took a swim break and tried out the pool here, which was delicious. But holy cow, I’d forgotten how tiring swimming can be, and what it’s like to step out of the water and feel gravity reclaiming what was just light and buoyant.

Later on, we went for an evening walk and were forced by rain into a sushi restaurant where we had terrific sushi (although the spicy tuna was a bit too much for me). We’ve been told that Jaco picks up considerably during the weekends, when everyone from San Jose comes down to spend some time here, and it does seem a good bit livelier this evening.

And a little translating! I’ve started “Panecillo tostado, con devoción para acompaña” and am undoubtedly mangling it considerably, all in the name of practice.

The Editing class is split into three sections. In this first session, we focused on developmental, or “big picture,” editing.

Some people are taking the class in order to edit their own stuff, others to edit for other folks, a couple for a combination of that. We talked about what a developmental edit is intended to do, and how it’s different from a copy-edit. In fact, you want to avoid copy-editing (other than a couple of cases which I’ll get to in a minute) because often that sentence you’re tinkering with will end up discarded or substantially revised in the final version.

Honing your editing ability to where you can trust it is one way to free yourself up when writing. Instead of listening to the internal editor telling you that sentence isn’t perfect or that you need to check that name on Wikipedia before using it, you can assure that editor it will get its chance during the revision process and go on writing.

Developing a process also helps you know when to stop rewriting. I work from the big picture stuff in, moving to small sentence level details in a second or third draft. Usually my process goes like this:

1. Bang out a first draft. It may have parenthetical directions like (expand on this) or (transition here) or (describe), but it is a complete story.
2. (Optional but encouraged) Let it sit for a week or two. This is where procrastination can really bite you in the ass.
3. Print out the draft and write all over it. This is my developmental edit, in which structures may get changes, sections moved (or eliminated), point of view or tense changed, etc. It’s also where all those parenthetical directions get fulfilled.
4. Entering these changes onto the computer may involve some more tinkering as I do so, but generally I’m working towards another draft that I can print out.
5. That draft gets printed out and edited again. This stage is where I read aloud and tinker at the sentence and paragraph level. I may changes names at this point, and I’ll do things like look for adverbs (as discussed in The 10% Solution).
6. I will probably do another read aloud pass after that’s entered into the computer, depending on how hard a deadline is pressing.

More on developmental editing, what it is, how I do it, and how one needs to adapt editing to genres such as hard SF, dark fantasy, horror, etc, in another post.