June 25, 2009

You are currently browsing the daily archive for June 25, 2009.

Edit-a-thon, Day 2

June 25, 2009 in Lament of the Dove

I think last night’s estimate was about right: turns out I killed 260 words out of Chapter 21 tonight. The page count is down to 26, but the 26th page is really only half a page, and with judicious pruning I might be able to kill the rest of that page too. We’ll see tomorrow night.

In addition to just general verbiage reduction, I found at least a couple more places where I could eliminate sentences that were not absolutely critical to the action. It’ll be amusing to me at some point to compare my style in the first draft of this thing with my style in the fourth.

Edited tonight: -260
Chapter 21 revised total: 6,224
Lament of the Dove revised total (fourth draft): 121,461

Tags:

Lament of the Dove edit watch: Day 1!

June 25, 2009 in Lament of the Dove

About 200 words tonight killed in Chapter 21. Page count of that chapter went down another page from 28 to 27. Biggest edit: deleted an entire paragraph in which I rather fancied the imagery but in which I had to make myself realize that actually, it didn’t really need to be there.

There’s another six pages or so that I haven’t scanned through yet in this chapter, and I don’t know yet what this means in terms of how many more words I’ll be able to kill from it. Another couple of hundred, if I’m lucky; a net loss of 600 or so on the chapter feels kind of light to get me to the goal, though.

We’ll see what happens tomorrow.

Edited tonight: -204
Chapter 21 revised total: 6,484
Lament of the Dove revised total (fourth draft): 121,721

Tags: