Abandon ship! All hands abandon ship!
Jul. 25th, 2007 09:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsThe latest arc in the Journal Entries is finally coming to a close. 21 chapters. 100,361 words. (Horus, is anyone other than me actually going to read that? Especially since there are no furries in it, other than as side characters? It's all dickgirls, clones, and biological robots.)
I'm going through right now and killing my adverbs, reading it aloud to find the awkward sentences, filtering out my filters, activating as many passive sentences as I can find, punching up my verbs and colorizing my adjectives, and just generally putting the final layer of polish on a year-long odyssey to get this darn thing out the door.
This being a soap opera, chapter six (the one I revised this morning) closes with one of the major arc characters listening in on her roommate and her roommate's, um, friend's sweet nothings conversation. And there, as she's listening, I found three paragraphs of pure infodump: three paragraphs that out of nowhere explain some of the character's motivations in terms of their cultural history.
I realized as I read through it that my readers did not need to know, at that moment, that these three characters were all from the most conservative cultural branch of the isolated colony and that each was responding in his or her own way to the freedom from fear that reunion with the rest of the Terran government offered (through access to advanced medical technologies once more). There were other things to be afraid of, but none of them came from merely being human.
The readers really didn't need to know the whole history of a pre-WW2 Italian socialist and feminist and her thinking of women and community...
Now I just have to go re-read everything and make sure that the audience gets a sense that yes, Athenia was founded by idealists who embraced a liberal notion of freedom in both the personal and economic spheres, and Sparta was deliberately created (and aggressively named) later in response to the dissolution some felt came with that liberality. Or maybe I just need to ratchet up the interpersonal tension a bit. But I don't want to rewrite it again.
Quincy Jones once said, "I never finish a project. I just abandon it."
I'm going through right now and killing my adverbs, reading it aloud to find the awkward sentences, filtering out my filters, activating as many passive sentences as I can find, punching up my verbs and colorizing my adjectives, and just generally putting the final layer of polish on a year-long odyssey to get this darn thing out the door.
This being a soap opera, chapter six (the one I revised this morning) closes with one of the major arc characters listening in on her roommate and her roommate's, um, friend's sweet nothings conversation. And there, as she's listening, I found three paragraphs of pure infodump: three paragraphs that out of nowhere explain some of the character's motivations in terms of their cultural history.
I realized as I read through it that my readers did not need to know, at that moment, that these three characters were all from the most conservative cultural branch of the isolated colony and that each was responding in his or her own way to the freedom from fear that reunion with the rest of the Terran government offered (through access to advanced medical technologies once more). There were other things to be afraid of, but none of them came from merely being human.
The readers really didn't need to know the whole history of a pre-WW2 Italian socialist and feminist and her thinking of women and community...
Now I just have to go re-read everything and make sure that the audience gets a sense that yes, Athenia was founded by idealists who embraced a liberal notion of freedom in both the personal and economic spheres, and Sparta was deliberately created (and aggressively named) later in response to the dissolution some felt came with that liberality. Or maybe I just need to ratchet up the interpersonal tension a bit. But I don't want to rewrite it again.
Quincy Jones once said, "I never finish a project. I just abandon it."
