Post-Nano Update: Seeds of Blood first edits 40%

~ crossovercreativechaos

About 40% of the way through the first round of edits on Seeds. Still working on some small scenes I need to insert while I’m going through the rest of the manuscript to do nitpicky grammar bits and toss out unneeded words.

In a lot of ways, editing a rough draft is a bit like decluttering a house. It looks like it’ll take forever. So sometimes the best thing you can do is start from the front door and just go through the place, tossing everything that’s obviously junk. Get out all the extraneous words, straighten up “I meant to say X”, and….

Well, that’s the first round of edits. It doesn’t get out everything. But getting out what obviously isn’t useful gives you some mental room to breathe. Without that verbal clutter, the rest of the draft should read more easily, flow more smoothly – and that should make other problems pop out in the second draft, that before were just hidden in the rest of the mess. It’s hard to find “wait, where did that FBI agent go?” in the middle of “what exactly did you mean to say in this stumbling description of the man-eating tree fight?”

…Yes, there are man-eating trees. *EG*

(Church wants a chainsaw. So much.)

28 thoughts on “Post-Nano Update: Seeds of Blood first edits 40%”

  1. >Yes, there are man-eating trees. *EG*
    (Church wants a chainsaw. So much.)>
    Well that or a heavy duty defoliant that he can spray on them.

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      1. >Defoliant doesn’t work fast enough. 😉>
        Just means you need a stronger one.

        “That stuff is melting the tree.”

        “It killed the leaves first so it still counts as a defoliant!”

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    2. Probably would piss off the tree. Remember the Ents in LOTR, Two Towers? .””… a very tall handsome Ent, got caught in a spray of some liquid fire and burned like a torch: a horrible sight. That sent them mad. … It was staggering. … ” Aidan or someone would have to have lots of fireballs, or a firestorm or something ready to use.

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  3. Though speaking from experience, but allowing that better made chainsaws may function more smoothly, Chain saws are rather finicky tools and not what I’d want for taking on an evil tree monster unless I had friends to hold it off of me while I was using it.

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  4. In my first round of edits, I tossed out 12 pages and added 24. In my second round, I tossed out 28. Since then, I’ve tossed out 7 and I’m still working on making certain characters more in character. Just tonight, I’ve changed the wording of over five paragraphs of the first chapter substantially.

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    1. Hmm. I don’t usually end up tossing a lot of pages. Working on making characters more in-character, oh boy, yes. That can be very, very tricky.

      One thing that sometimes helps is to find a image for your characters – bit of fantasy art, fanart, random photo, what have you. It helps when considering “what would X do?”

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      1. I had an incredible amount of OOC behavior to write out. Part of it was that it was originally intended as a sequel to [i]My Soul to Keep[/i], an unfinished Rurouni Kenshin reincarnation fic whose author appears to have discovered that she made critical mistakes. One of them was doing no research. That would have told her that by real world standards, Hiko had no business running a hospital. You just don’t give patients medicine yourself when you are the head physician or give Xanax for insomnia. For the first, you must give the prescribing order to a pharmacist who checks for errors and if they find none, gives it to a nurse who makes the same check and gives the DOSE, not the entire bottle, to the patient. That would have prevented so much drama, and so would having staff, not other patients, checking on Kenshin.

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  5. It just occurred to me: do you just have really high standards for your writing? Because you don’t seem to need to rough in the entire thing and put yourself through multiple rounds of edits to make a fanfic good enough to post without getting the smart people to throw tomatoes at you on message boards they hope you don’t find.

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    1. Even if it were a fanfic, editing that thoroughly wouldn’t be a bad idea, just for the proper development of one’s professional writing skills.

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      1. *Nod* Someone I read compared fanfic to swimming in a heated pool, vs. origfic as like trying to swim the English Channel. I do fanfic for fun, but also exercise, so when I do origfic I’ve got that to back me.

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      1. I’m saying that there is no way I could write without being able to insert new chapters in between old. Also, I have pretty serious executive function deficits, which means that I might forget what I should know. My third round of edits is different, as it does not involve printing off the draft I have.

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      2. To clarify, I could not post anything that is only partially completed. Not unless I was only writing what I knew and could trust myself to remember important details.

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  7. CHLOROFIEND! Get the flamethrower! XD LOL, there’s actually a lot of legends about man-eating trees – my favorite is the creepy story of that one tree that feeds on human blood and the trunk looks like it has faces on it. Gives me the shivers. ;P

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