Brief Update on Tales: First Draft Run Half Through

Over 70 of 138 pages of Tell No Tales edited!

I will note that so far I’ve run into some amusing typos – “laid” instead of “said” can make the meaning of a sentence so messy – and ruthlessly cut some extra sentence padding to the tune of at least a few hundred words. (Because NaNo. You don’t cut any words in NaNo. Nope.)

OTOH I’ve also added a few hundred-odd words of description, action, and clarifications of various bits. So net I’ve managed to get the draft to a little over 55K words.

This edit is for hitting all the small (and maybe not so small) things that stick out at me. Repeated words and turns of phrase, dialogue that needs to be tweaked to match the character better, maybe getting in more description of place now that I have the whole sweep of events laid out.

Hoping to make the descriptions in this book very grounded, because, well, ghost. (Maybe-ghost. Hmm.) Physical monsters, IMHO, you may be able to write the setting a little loosely, because alien, dragon, or Bigfoot, physics is still “gravity works”. But a spirit-monster? That’s going outside the physical realm of light, sound, and gravity. So the physical-world descriptions better be rock solid, to contrast against the spirit.

Which is probably one of the reasons I wanted Devon to be a very hands-on character. 🙂 Poor guy. You can’t exactly take a wrench to a wandering spirit….

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