I'm very pleased to announce that I'm finished on the second draft of Blood 2: The Unforgiven. I finally got to blitz it on Sunday night and finish putting in revisions, changing names, and looking for cliches. What's the next step? Well, first I print it out. I think I'll use my home printer this time, as it's still too early to be exploiting work for this. Then I'll give it one more revision, just to make sure there aren't any artifacts left over. Sort of a dress rehearsal to make sure everyone's playing the part right. If I was publishing this, I might spend more than two revisions on it, but I've been spending far too long on this thing, which isn't even going to further my career.
In that vein, I have to say that one of the things I didn't do on the revision is restructuring. In part 3, I made some notes to move this scene here and that scene there. When I looked at them during the input, I saw two things. One - it would take a long time to do it. Two - doing it would mean the pacing would change, and the more I looked at it, the way I wanted to do it didn't make sense to me. I don't know if I made those notes for a reason, but I ignored them. Now, I'm not sure whether I made that decision because it didn't make sense in the story, or I was just lazy. I keep trying to justify it by saying I made a strategic decision in the interest of time and story context. I designed the story to go in this order. I think changing it would have caused as many problems as keeping it the same, if not moreso. So far, I have never done a restructuring to that level, so I'm not sure if I'm just not being lazy.
But that won't be for a while. I've got two tasks to do first. One is Black Hole Son 1.5. This is a long time coming, and I'm trying to transition out of rebellious, adolescent, teen angst with dark occult stuff mode and into rebellious, adolescent, teen angst with psionics mode. I made a glance at the draft a few days ago when I inserted a note. I think this might take a long time. Some things are simple find and replace. Some things are reviewing (like make sure Character Q isn't doing this in scene 4). Some things are total restructuring, where I'm going to have to take out whole scenes/chapters and re-write them. This time it will be easier than Blood 2 since I'm still working out of the rough draft and I haven't invested that much time in its structure. I just hope I remember everything.
The second thing is my short stories. I've got three that I think I've got enough info on to start drafting - fairy story, vampire story, white mage story. Now this is important as well for establishing my career, since it's a lot easier to get the foot in the door with short stories than with novels right away. Even though I feel like I'm a novel writer, I think it would be good if I can get a little credit.
Then the question is, which one do I work on first? The short grift or the long grift? And when will I have time for any of this?Labels: Black Hole Son, Blood 2: The Unforgiven, short stories