rynling | Entries tagged with editing

I finished the first draft of the last chapter of An Unfound Door; and, while I was editing, I decided that one of the minor characters should be female instead of male. As a treat to myself. So now I'm going back into Chapter Six and writing a scene with this character, and I'm falling in love with her.

As the evening progressed, Agnes found her attention claimed by the Duchess of Margrave, a tall and broad-shouldered woman with an easy smile and gray eyes as pale as her wheat-colored hair. Margrave had survived her late husband with a gaggle of bachelor sons, each of whom was as strapping as their mother. The duchess reminded Agnes of a sunflower, standing a head above the crowd and beaming. Her affability was infectious, and she made no attempt to veil the eligibility of her sons, whom she praised like the horses for which her duchy was justifiably famous.

Agnes may prefer dark and brooding monster men, but I would happily marry one of the bisexual horse lady's large adult sons. Or maybe I'll skip the sons; I hear she's single.

I was planning to edit my Lovecraftian monster romance story, "The Annotated Kitab al-Azif," a page at a time before I started thinking about submitting it to various magazines. I generally hate editing, but I couldn't stop myself from going through the whole thing when I sat down to work on it this morning. I was like, "But then what happens??" It's got a nice flow and good momentum.

I might be delusional, but you know what? I think this story might actually be okay. Kind of good, even.

I hope I'm not jumping the gun, but I think it's ready to submit.

But what if I did write a graphic novel?

This is what would need to happen:

( Read more... )

Even if I don’t end up pursuing a graphic novel, this is still a good strategy for managing the writing project.

What to Do If You Have Writer's Block
https://dduane.tumblr.com/post/633616801739276289/what-to-do-if-you-have-writers-block

To summarize, what Duane is suggesting is that, if you're having trouble, you should:

(a) Focus on one piece,
(b) Read it from the beginning,
(c) Take a few days to think about where it needs to go,
(d) Get rid of stuff it doesn't need, and then
(e) Write the character who speaks to you most directly.

I'm not sure if the particulars of this advice work for me, but it's interesting to consider. After all, it's always nice when a story falls into your hands fully formed, but it's been my experience that working on longer pieces involves sustained periods of waiting, reflection, and problem solving.

Chapter Five is finished!

I've got a rough outline of Chapter Four, which I'll probably write alongside Chapter Six. Chapter Four is necessary stage setting, while Chapter Six is a direct confrontation between the two main characters that establishes the central conflict.

I'm about halfway done with editing Chapter Three. A few pages in, I figured out a plot shortcut that will make things much easier to follow. Basically, instead of being abducted by a third party, the princess absconds of her own volition. (Thank you FFIX!) This happens before the narration begins, so it's easier to summarize why the princess made the decision to leave than trying to hint at the logistics of a kidnapping from a limited third-person perspective. Girlboss win!

...but I do have to rewrite and re-edit substantial parts of the third chapter. I'm very slow, but it's getting there.

I don't have the patience to create anything as fancy as a mood board, but I've found it helpful to search and save a few images of environments to use as inspiration. I had to download a "Save WebP as" extension for my browser, and I've had to shift through more low-quality files from Pinterest and Getty Images than I remember having to for past projects, but it's been worth it.

I'm also going to try to do a #WIPWesdneday series on Twitter for the rest of the year. I've been shy about posting my writing there, but it's good to have at least a little accountability to keep me moving forward.

I did the last set of edits on Malice yesterday to tighten the language and fix a few stray typos. It took almost all day, from noon to eight in the evening, but I think everything turned out okay. I posted the last two chapters on FFN and moved the story folder into my digital archives.

I feel like I should do something to celebrate, but what I actually did was write the second chapter of the second story arc of The Demon King, as well as the first half of an original story based on the Poe Collector in Ocarina of Time.

I’m going to continue to post The Demon King on AO3 (with better initial editing this time around, hopefully), and what I’m going to do with the original story is this:

- finish it
- create a copy of the file
- edit it while pasting the serial numbers back on
- very quietly post that version on Tumblr and AO3
- return to the original version
- polish it based on my experience editing the fanfic
- submit that version to magazines

We’ll see how this works, I guess. The main thing is to be able to retain a sense of joy in writing by any means possible.

If spending time writing and drawing makes me happy, does spending more time writing and drawing make me more happy?

It turns out the answer is YES!!

It also turns out that, if I have more time to spend on creative projects, I won't necessarily produce more. Instead, I'll edit and experiment more while devoting more time on skill development. What this means is that I'm not producing more work, but I'm hopefully producing better work.

If I had to guess, I might say that this is why a lot of younger creative people - visual artists especially - have such polished and sophisticated styles. Instead of having to spend all day on tedious adult nonsense, they have the time and emotional energy to sit down and write or draw for hours at a time. (There's also the fact that younger brains pick up and retain information easily, as well as the fact that younger brains tend to bounce back from trauma like negative social feedback quickly, but I'm going to conveniently ignore both of those facts.) People have done studies about this, and various theories been posited and then debunked, but I really do think a large portion of "talent" is just the amount of time you spend doing something.

(Although I'm not going to lie, the quality of my visual art in particular improved immensely when I finally bit the bullet and bought myself a semi-professional tablet. I use it every day, I love it very much, and I do not regret a single one of the hundreds of dollars I spent on it.)

No longer having to deal with full-on anxiety helps as well. Aside from general quality-of-life issues, it's nice to be able to sit down with a project without feeling pressure to make it perfect or risk backlash. Like, it's okay to take on projects that I'm not already 100% sure I can handle, and it's okay to fail a little and cut a few corners as I figure out what I'm doing in small increments.

In a fortunate turn of events, this mentality of "it's okay to be shit" has carried over to other aspects of my life. I'm more willing to start (and continue!) conversations on social media and Discord without expecting them to go anywhere, and I'm also more willing to try different types of video games. If nothing else, I finally started playing Hollow Knight, and damn if being able to spend time in the world of that game isn't the best reward for improving my mental health and outlook on life.

Another solid editing tip is not to be discouraged when things take a long time.

Social media can make it feel as though everyone is doing everything all the time. It's true that some people really are extremely productive, but you don't know their story and shouldn't worry about matching that level of social media activity.

If a project takes time to come to fruition, that's okay. You're good. Keep going.

- Do you really need those adverbs? Do you really?

- I’m telling you, just get rid of past perfect participles. Just do it.

- There’s no need to frame thoughts and observations as thoughts and observations in limited third-person narration. State them as facts, and the reader will infer that they’re coming from the perspective of the viewpoint character.

- New rule: You only get one (1) run-on sentence per story or chapter. Choose wisely.

- Another new rule: You only get one (1) reflexive verb per story of chapter, and you probably shouldn’t even have that one.

- Try to rethink common verbs that usually have more specific alternatives, such as “give,” “get,” “put,” “have,” and so on.

- If a paragraph would work better as two paragraphs, just break the paragraph. This is not academic writing. A paragraph should really only be about five or six sentences long.

As always, I am destroying past participles left and right. The past perfect tense is almost always understood in English without needing to put some version of “had” everywhere.

I’m going to allow Balthazar to continue to do everything in a characteristically pedestrian manner, but I’ve been doing my best to elevate all of the verbs used to describe Ceres’s actions by at least one degree. Ceres does not “sit down,” for example; she “alights upon.” I’m trying to keep this lowkey, though, because I don’t want it to get obnoxious.

I’m also working on giving Balthazar a more distinctive authorial voice in his chapter heading notes. What I’m aiming for is a needlessly fancy style that borders on purple prose, so I’ve been trying to punch up the verbs he uses in his writing. At the same time, I want to try to straddle a line between his descriptions of Whitespire being ironic and his descriptions of Ceres herself being sincere. This is also something to work on in stages, I think.

I think we can all collectively agree that italics are difficult to read.

( Read more... )

As the story continues, I think it’s going to be fun to start playing with the disconnect between what various characters take for granted as common knowledge, but I want this to remain comfortably in the realm of humor and not venture into the territory of “who knows what secrets at what point in the story.” If anyone asks, you didn’t hear this from me, but plot is overrated.

I am continuing to take psychic damage as I continue to edit The Demon King. One of the main things I'm trying to work on is moving away from situating environmental descriptions within the perspective character's viewpoint. So instead of "He noticed that the sky was blue," I want to have "The sky was blue."

I've realized that this is a problem with Balthazar especially. I think it's because I've got this idea of him as someone who is constantly hyper-aware of his surroundings. What Balthazar does and doesn't notice might be fun to play with when I eventually get to the "Balthazar dies a lot" segment of the story, but for now it just comes off as bad writing.

I'm also trying to have Balthazar say things outright instead of just thinking them, and I'm trying to cultivate more of a flat affect in his voice while allowing him to be more openly disagreeable.

Ceres is mostly okay, but I'm working on refining her voice as well. She could be much more eloquent than I've written her, and also much more passive-aggressive. It's probably good to adjust this in stages.

Something else I'm trying to get rid of every time I encounter it are verbal additions that convey direction, meaning that things like "he walked up" and "he looked down" are shortened to "he walked" and "he looked." These verbal suffixes come from me reading too much Japanese, and it's a bad writing habit I need to break. The same applies for verbs whose "direction" indicates whether they're self-reflexive or performed for the benefit of someone else.

And, as always, there is the never-ending battle of seeking out and destroying adverbs.

Anyway, Balthazar's goal is right in the story summary on AO3, but I decided to state it more forcefully and with less comedic ambiguity about halfway through the story itself, right at the end of the fifth chapter.

The story has ten chapters, and I'm about half done with the first round of edits. I should be able to meet my projection of finishing by March 15, a month after I completed the first draft. The draft is only about 30k words, but the psychic damage I'm taking from finding typos and inconsistencies and unintended repetitions cannot be exaggerated, so progress is slow.

After that, I'm going to let the story sit unmolested for another month before writing a formal query. I'll then do another round of edits before participating in several pitch events starting in late May.

As for constructive feedback from my first readers, what I have is basically "I don't like how Balthazar is such a sadsack" and "I don't like how Ceres is so mean." To which I have to respond that this is not YA fiction, and they're both difficult people who are only protagonists by virtue of their narrative roles as point-of-view characters who drive the plot. I already pulled my punches for both of these characters in a major way, and I'm not sure how much softer I can make them without losing the texture and flavor of the story. Also, my real-life friends are just going to have to trust me (and my Twitter feed) that there's a sizable audience of readers who are primed and thirsty for stories about powerful wizards who make shitty life choices while being ambiguously romantically involved with each other, and I hope that this is something a potential agent will be able to recognize.

I finished the cover! Finally!

What happened is that I wasn't able to communicate to the cover artist that there needs to be blank space on the image for the title. I suspect that, if we had been communicating over email instead of through Twitter DMs, this wouldn't have been an issue. Live and learn, I guess. In any case, this wasn't anyone's fault, just something that needed to be taken care of.

The artist was kind enough to send me the original Photoshop document, which had well over a hundred layers. Since the cover image is a forest scene, with lots of details and textures and light dappling and layer effects, it took me about seven hours to figure out how to edit the image properly so that I could put in the title. Yesterday I just had to make myself sit down and put in the last two hours of work until it was finished. But it's done! And it looks amazing!

My task for today is to do page layout for the last few poems. A couple of people sent me PDF or JPEG files of text with creative formatting that I was too stressed out to handle last year. Do I try to preserve the author's formatting, or just ignore it? I'm leaning toward "ignore," but I'll see what I can do. It's fantastic work, but the quality of the image files is such that I can't just paste them into the zine without it looking like garbage, which isn't fair to the authors.

Since October, I've been applying and submitting to a number of zines and other publications, and I now have a much better sense of what works, how it works, and why it works. I think that, if I ever do anything like this in the future, I should have people send in their work via a Google form (which is actually what I've started doing with my undergrads), as doing so allows you to put the instructions right there on the application form and organize everyone's submissions as text boxes and image libraries.

One of the reasons I don’t like wordcounts as a measure of writing activity is because, to me at least, so much of writing is editing, and so much of editing is deleting things, like:

- The reader doesn’t need to know this
- The reader can figure this out for themselves
- This description is unnecessary
- This subordinate clause is unnecessary
- This prepositional phrase is unnecessary
- This past perfect participle is unnecessary
- This dialogue tag is unnecessary
- This sentence needs to be shorter
- You repeated this word like three times
- You like this word but it breaks the flow of the sentence
- This observation is not as amusing to the reader as it is to you

I have to admit that I don’t much care for writing advice along the lines of “show don’t tell” and “don’t force the character’s perspective on the reader,” none of which tends to work with the sort of limited third-person narration I favor, in which the reader only has access to what the character would notice or remark on. In fact, I tend to find action-focused third-person omniscient narration tedious.

Still, so much of editing is deleting and rewriting, which is why I can spend an intense and focused half hour on a piece of writing and go from 1570 words to 1530 words. Work is being done, but “wordcount” just isn’t a meaningful measure of progress.

Idk, I always get a little defensive during Nanowrimo. Every month is novel writing month in my house.

I tend to have a “bird by bird” approach to projects, meaning that I force myself to do a little every day until I attain a critical mass where the sheer momentum drives me forward.

The problem I’m having with the book I’m working on is that I’ve never been able to reach a place where I’m excited about the work and motivated to finish it. I keep going, bird by bird by bird, but I am so fucking sick of birds.

I hate my book project, and it’s making me hate myself. This has been going on for almost two years now, and it’s depressing. The worst thing is that I’m at a point where, if I just sit down and put in a solid eight hours of work, I will have a not-entirely-awful draft. I feel bad because I’ve been plugging away at this for so long, but I think I need to give myself permission to half-ass the rest of job and just go ahead and send in a mediocre manuscript.

On Monday morning. I am going to send in whatever I have on Monday morning.

I'm more or less constantly editing my more recent fic, but what prompted me to go back to my old FFVI fic was embarking on a deep dive into Vrazdova's archives. We used to be friends of a sort on DeviantArt (where she went by fashion-jerk), and when someone recently sent me a link to her BBC Sherlock story Adagio Lamentoso I recognized her name immediately.

Her writing is good, and I mean like, really good. Flawless, actually.

I'm gradually working my way through her FFVI novel Unbalanced; and, even though I'm very much enjoying myself, it also pains me to see that she wrote this in 2012, especially since the only thing I wrote in 2012 was, well... Anthro Bowser in Leather Pants. In other words, while I was partying Vrazdova studied the blade. This is why she is a fantastic writer and I am still embarrassing myself every time I post something.

I wasn't just drinking and goofing off, though. Up until around 2013 I maintained a fairly steady flow of content on LiveJournal, and 2012 was also the year that I finally managed to establish myself as a professional writer, albeit in an entirely different style and genre of writing. I was working my ass off at the beginning of my career, which is probably why I thought that I didn't have time to write fiction. I told myself that it was something I would do once I didn't have to worry about paying the rent, and in any case I didn't know anyone who also wrote fiction and could have encouraged me or given me feedback.

I think it's probably fair to say that Vrazdova has an innate level of talent that I simply do not, and there's really nothing I can do about that - but also, I should have started taking my writing a lot more seriously much earlier than I did. As things stand, I feel like I'm having to work extra hard just to catch up.

The take-away point here is that, if I want to be serious about writing, I am going to have to stop wasting time and (a) start writing original fiction so that I can (b) start getting challenging and constructive feedback. What this means in concrete terms is that I am going to have to deprioritize writing fic in order to put together a body of work that can be submitted along with applications for writing workshops.

More on this story as it develops, I guess?

Because why write new fic when you can torture yourself by editing old fic?

After the World Was Won
This is a story about sexism in STEM fields wherein Daryl is frustrated with Setzer for achieving more recognition for doing basically the same work. Now that I am closer to the age I intended Daryl to be in the story, however, I realize that intelligent adults don't express frustration in quite the way I had her doing. I therefore made Daryl's language less blunt and her sense of ironic detachment drier. Setzer has an awkward monologue that I could have edited, but I decided that it's in character for it to remain a bit stilted.

Another Chip in the Pile
Dubious consent was a major theme in m/m fanfic when I wrote this story. I remember being bothered by that but at the same time interested in what dubious consent can do that depictions of healthy relationships cannot. For whatever reason, I still find stories of emotionally damaged people stumbling backwards into sex compelling, and I'm surprised by how fond I am of this fic, which is about Owzer attempting to fuck Setzer out of his depression. Politics aside, editing this fic taught me that the word "guttural" achieves semantic satiation very quickly, and I am hereby instating an ironclad rule that it can only be used once in any given story about buttsex.

Every King Needs His Guard
This is a very short postgame fic about Sabin assassinating Cid so that Edgar doesn't have to. I edited it to get rid of some of the more florid phrasing while making Sabin a bit scarier.

The Lure of Machinery
You can really tell I was still developing my chops when I wrote this one. Instead of fixing the numerous instances of stylistic awkwardness, I just deleted them wholesale. I should probably delete this entire story, but I am still to this day super into the idea of Setzer and Edgar being engineer husbands.

Float
I wrote this Setzer/Edgar story only five months after "The Lure of Machinery," but it is worlds better. It's not good, exactly, but it's moving in the right direction. I edited the dialog to make it tighter and crispier. I've been so tits deeps in the pretentiousness of Zelda fic that I forgot I enjoy writing banter... I should get back to that at some point.

Two Kingdoms
A year or two ago the great and noble Kashuan reblogged a post about how the OP immediately hits the back button upon realizing that a fic is written with a first-person narrative voice. I thought of this specific Peach/Bowser fic when I read that post, and now I have finally edited it to be in third person. This actually took a substantial amount of work, but I will not embarrass myself by revealing just how much. The story is still a heap of weird and pretentious garbage based on deep lore culled from the instruction manuals of the NES era Super Mario games, but at least now it's marginally less cringe-inducing.

Claws and Lace
This is not old fic, but I've been returning to it to make edits every week since I posted it. When I said that it needed a lot of editing I meant that it needed A LOT of editing; I am very serious about my crackfic and would never joke about something like this. If I am going to write a story about Peach and Bowser having awkward monster sex then it is going to be classy and well edited, so help me Crackfic Jesus.

Okay wow, making these cosmetic changes has indeed made me feel a lot better about my monumental lack of progress on more meaningful projects. Good job team!

After the hot mess of my recent Peach/Bowser smutfic, I've started to realize how truly dysfunctional my editing process is.

I'm constantly editing as I write a story. Not only will I begin each writing session by editing the previous day's writing, but I'll also write the same damn sentence multiple times. I think this helps with plot cohesion, and it means that I'm always saying exactly what I want without a lot of filler. Unfortunately, it also means that sentences and paragraphs tend to exist in multiple states at the same time, which results in technical errors like a lack of subject-verb agreement and stylistic awkwardness such as repeated words. In other words, the stitches holding together the seams are visible.

Once I finish with a unit of writing, I generally let it sit for a day or two before reading it over at least two or three times. I catch a lot of inconsistencies this way, but I also tend to get bored and impatient to move on to the next thing. I'll go ahead and post whatever it is on AO3, and then I'll eat lunch or take a walk or something.

After an hour or so has passed, I'll take my car out of my building's garage, park it on the street somewhere, and then sit there with my laptop and my iPad. I will read the story out loud from the AO3 page on my iPad screen while pausing to make any necessary corrections.

I will then copy all the text from AO3, paste it into the text field of a Tumblr post, and go through the whole thing again. Oddly enough, this is where I always end up finding the most errors. If I had to guess, I think the drastically different dimensions (specifically, the narrowness of the column in the Tumblr text editor) shake everything up just enough for me to be able to see things that I had previously glossed over.

This process takes a long time, and it also means that the initial post on AO3 is going to be messy for two or three hours. And even after I clean everything up, I generally return a week or two later and find even more things that need fixing.

The best thing for me to do would be to have a beta reader who could look over my work in stages, the first of which would be catching stylistic errors, and the second would be asking difficult questions about things like word choice and character motivation. Finding a good beta reader is more difficult than perhaps it should be, however, especially for someone like me, who needs a relatively long time to be able to trust and open up to someone. Over the past two years I've actually tried to ask two separate people I know in real life to be my beta readers, but neither worked out for various reasons. Writing is a skill, and so is editing; just because you're good at creating your own work doesn't mean you'll be able to give productive feedback to someone else.

In the end, I think it's worth remembering that I only started getting serious about my writing in November 2014, and it's really not fair to expect that my work will be perfect after only two and a half years' worth of practice. I've made a lot of progress with my writing, and hopefully my editing will continue to improve as well.

I've been editing about four posts a day on my video game blog over the course of the past few weeks, and I'm finally done. I'm sure there are still typos, because that's how I roll, but I think I managed to catch and correct the most egregious errors. I also think I managed to make good progress in the way I think and write about games.

I began this blog last July, and since then I have written 81 posts, with an average of 1,000 words per post. This means that, in the past fifteen months, I have written and edited 81,000 words about video games. Hot damn.

Although it's hosted by Wordpress, which tends to be highly indexed on search engines, the blog receives less than a dozen hits per day and only has six subscribers. This is actually convenient for me, since it means there's nothing holding me back from cannibalizing my own writing. I've got several specific projects in mind, but first I need to submit my stupid manuscript for my stupid book about comics.

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Rynling R&D

Entries tagged with editing

Editing An Unfound Door

The Annotated Kitab al-Azif

Re: Back on My Bullshit

It's Okay to Wait for Your Characters

An Unfound Door Progress Report

No More Malice

Time Is Talent

Re: More Editing Notes

More Editing Notes

More Demon King Editing, Verbs Edition

More Demon King Editing, Fantasy Language Edition

Editing Voice and Viewpoint

Re: Balthazar as Antagonist

Legend of Haiku Zine, Part 2

Fuck Wordcounts

Kill All Birds

Re: Editing Old Fic

Editing Old Fic

The Hell of My Own Editing

Game Blarg