Friday, August 27, 2010

Weekly Update - Fish Hooked

This has been an interesting week - in the same way having a fish hook in your hand is interesting, I guess.  At first, you don't really feel anything, but you're standing there with a piece of metal sticking out of you.  "My, isn't that interesting," you think right before you realize someone is going to have to pull that thing out.  This is the point at which nothing hurts really bad, but you're dreading the pain you know is right around the corner. 

Last week Wednesday, I finished DLN (whose real name is Djinnocide, btw - snazzy title, eh?) and I spent the time between then and this most recent Wednesday trying to decide what I was going to do next.  I read a few books, watched a lot of TV and twisted in the wind.  I figured I could go back to revising the other book that's been on my sidebar for months - RTL.  But I was just meh about tackling that one again.  So, I dinked around with a couple other things to no avail.

And I started thinking about Bloodflow (or Nanotechnology in another incarnation).  Great premise, and pretty damn good writing, but the plot's all over the damn place.  I did some editing there, and I still love the piece, but I've played with this so many times it took a day to realize I was editing on an old draft, and now I'm not sure which direction I like better.  :shrug:

Enter the suggestions I talked about on Wednesday.  Okay, sounds like a plan.  I've got to print out Bloodflow.  I get it.  Okay.  Yeah.  Umm, that's a daunting task if there ever was one.  The damn thing's like a big jigsaw puzzle.  What I need to do is take the pieces and reassemble them into a cohesive whole.  And this is like a 5000 piece sucker.

So, while I'm standing here staring at that painful problem, I decided to take another suggestion from the same post.  I turned DLN on its ear by changing the whole thing to another font.  I think the one I settled on was something called Utlaat or some such silliness.  The specifics don't matter, just the results.  Sure enough, I changed the font and...  I frickin hated what I wrote.  Talk about taking gaffs and making them GLARING ERRORS.  Holy shit.

I closed the manuscript and went off to some fluffy place in my head where everything is rainbows and bunnies.

Last night, I took another look at the DLN fish hook and it wasn't nearly as bad as I thought.  Sure, I had some HUGE info dumps in chapter two.  And some of the wording is lame.  All that can be fixed.  All I need to do is stop looking at the hook and just pull.

If you close your eyes, you hardly feel the barb. 

Playing in my head: Sugar, We're Going Down by Fall Out Boy

2 comments:

  1. Sometimes our fear is so much worse than reality. Our minds are good at magnifying the issue. Glad it wasn't as bad as you thought!

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  2. Oh, no! Change it back, change it back!

    ReplyDelete