The first part of Black Hole Son is complete. Hurrah.
Here's how it is. Like I said, I completed up to the part where the two ends meet. This means I'm one or two scenes short of what I originally estimated, which was 88,000 words. The grand total is, in fact, 84,774. 3,224 words short of my estimate, which isn't a bad thing. This beast needs to get trimmed down as much as possible. But if I kept with the same formula, that means the next two scenes have to be 3,000 words total in order to get my estimate. That's not happening. The problem was I had so much condensed in the next scenes, that each ended up with longer than average word counts.
I'm going to try to write short on the second storyline, but that won't be for a while. Now I get to do something I haven't done for a while. Revising.
Avatar needs revising as this will be the first story I'm going to try to submit. Hopefully, people will look past that it's a video game story, but I have to help it get there. There's not much writing advice on revising. Most people seem to have very different ways of doing it, if they do it at all. IF I ever get the point where I no longer need to revise, I'd be a happy man. I'd also be dead and dessicated.
Not that I don't mind revising. I quite enjoy it. It's like weeding. There's a certain satisfaction in eliminating all the junk and crap that you've accidentally wrote and turning it into a killer app. Same reason I like debugging. Take that problems. P-kew, p-kew (space laser sound). It's just more problem-solving.
Revising can be very hard or very easy, depending on what you wrote in the first place. My main focus is going to be elimination of needless words, first of all. Meaning, as Shakespeare said, "First, kill all the adverbs". Then after that I'm going to do it Stephen King style, where I read it like a reader, and make notes (I'll have to re-read his section on revising to make sure I've got the procedure down) as a reader, like "What the hell do you mean by this?" and "Doesn't make sense?" Not think about the solutions, just pointing out the problems. Then I'm going to use that, and the critiques I got back to go in piece by piece, changing what needs to be changed. It might be some skipping around, but I think I'm going to keep it the length it is.
After that, I final check for punctuation and typos, and it's set. To be sent off into the aether where I shall enjoy my first rejection slips to puddle my tears.Labels: Black Hole Son, Playable Character, revising