When In Doubt, Drop Back and Punt

I’m making real progress again on Talyn. Got a 1500 word net gain yesterday in spite of removing a solid chunk of text. I did it by going back to exactly the point where things went badly wrong, and writing the scene I should have written the first time. Sometimes I can pretend I got it right and just keep going, but this time I couldn’t get the brain to play along with the fingers.

So I actually fixed something in mid-first-draft.

I left in everything that I know that I’ll eventually have to cut, too — I know this is cowardice on my part — the equivalent of pretending the badly damage net under the tightrope is better than nothing — but I’m hoping that as I work my way through I’ll find something salvageable in the material that has to go. Any part of that hundred pages that I don’t have to discard will be to the good.

And just to add to the excitement, now I have to finish the galleys for Gods Old and Dark and get them back to Diana promptly, something that I’m going to have to do sitting on the couch in the afternoon while the kidlet is building Bionicles.

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3 responses to “When In Doubt, Drop Back and Punt”

  1. baka_kit Avatar
    baka_kit

    Gods Old and Dark? *ears prick up* When?

    Good luck with Talyn!

  2. Rick Avatar
    Rick

    What’re galleys and when will Gods be out? Good luck on fixing up Talyn!

  3. Jim Woosley Avatar
    Jim Woosley

    Hummm…

    That sounds like a good start on the fix. I’m confident that you can salvage part of the 100 pages, which will be a big help. Though I suspect this also means that the characters are starting to find their own voices, and are screaming "Hey, that bit you wrote on ms page 194 is NOT me!" Makes for harder writing but a better novel with will hopefully sell millions of copies 🙂 Good luck with the fix.

    Hurry up with those galleys — people are waiting 🙂

    Bionicles. My son went through a phase of them not a couple of years ago. A marvelous tool for teaching mechanical design. I was astonished looking at the ranges of mechanical motion he could achieve with his Bionicles robots. He’s also working on the Mindstorms robots — starting with a mini course at school a couple of years ago.

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