Revising: And THAT is how you turn 4,500 words into 2,250

Subtitle: Chapter Two Sucked

Phew! I need a beer.

Okay, it wasn't all bad. I think I managed to make something engaging and exciting while hinting at a couple of cool things as well that weren't there in the first draft. The scene with Eoin, Saera and Faine in the cart is much more tense, hopefully. I finally got rid of that weird conversation. I don't think people have conversations like that.

Thankfully, my longest chapter is now out of the way. I think I worked on it for 6 hours straight! Minus the time it took me to get Macca's in between. And I'd been so good with my eating this week!

Now getting a beer.

Mmm.

I've also gotten rid of that horrid "fortifying the leaf" scene with alchemist, and I've begun unweaving the leaf thing from the story entirely. I just didn't find it convincing enough. I might always use the concept in another Chronicle.

So here's what the first page looked like:

























And here's what one of the late pages looked like:

























And here's what pretty much every other page looked like:

























And the sad thing is I'm telling the truth. One of the pages had just one word changed. In the case of the one above, it sucked so much that I got rid of the whole thing. What an awkward, painfully long scene.

Yeah, Eoin, you should feel awkward. Who does this? Weirdo.

I invite you to read all the pages shown here.

2,250 words is on the shorter side for me, but it's above my minimum 2,000 words. I have no doubt at all that this is much stronger chapter. I look forward to reading it to see how it flows. It might go too quickly from early morning to night-time, but hopefully that's something I can easily fix on a later read-through.

I really hope the rest of the chapters don't turn out like this. If I cut 50% of every chapter, I won't have any book left. GASP FACE!

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2 comments:

Jean Davis said...

Good work on the edits! :)

I've been percolating a solution to turning three chapters into one in order to reduce word count. It's not easy, no sir.

Ryan Sullivan said...

Thanks. :)

On the contrary, I think I'm going to have to think of chapters to add in order to bring the word count back up. It's about the 65,000 word mark right now, and only going down. :(

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Welcome to The Dark Corner of the Mind. My name is Ryan Sullivan and my aim with this blog is to help others with their own writing, as well as to make note of some of my own writing endeavours.

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