Editing...

The Children's Moon

I took this photo on Saturday morning/early afternoon while lounging in the sunshine on one of the Adirondack chairs, I saw the little sliver of pale moon in the blue...I've always liked seeing it there during the day so I zoomed in with my little point n' shoot and caught it...


I finished reading through my latest manuscript Drinking from the Fishbowl on Saturday afternoon (the last time I worked on it was in 2008, so I had to get to know it again)...so now I have started over from the beginning, and will go deeper this time, it should move along as I have a firm grasp on the book as a whole and I pretty much know what needs to be done with it. It's a big book...after awhile I stopped keeping track of the page count, tho' the last I knew it was 530 or something...(The Fractured Hues of White Light in the double-spaced Word file was 516, and printed as a 437 page paperback so...I'm figuring Fishbowl will still weigh in under 500 pages by the time it goes to print). I'm not going to make a fuss about the size, there's not much I can do about it, the story will be told in it's own way, if what's there is good and it's got purpose, it's staying, I'm not going to strip the spirit out of it...I'll trust that if a reader likes what I do, and wants to read it, the size won't scare them off. I'll be brutal with it while going through the editing process (last time I edited this one, I whittled it down from 575 pages or something crazy like that. One earlier draft had ballooned to 703 pages, so I'm quite adept at being a brutal editor with my own work. Yes, I've kept track of the progress of my multiple drafts.) Page count/word count is a bugaboo when it comes to agents and publishers, they don't like anything too much over 100,000 words, yet, big books still get published (Jonathan Strange and Dr. Norrell, The Historian, The Time Traveler's Wife are beefy popular tomes), people still buy them...one of these days I'll come up with a less complicated slim story... someday, but in the meantime, this is what I have, and I'm not waiting around for 'my ship to come in'...

This book is the second one I wrote in this group of books that I have spent the last eleven years writing...it's centered on the relationship of three friends, Georgia Sullivan, Eugene Riley, and Bailey Muldoon... yes, it is a tangled triangle, and it is written with the intention of a "soap opera" feel to it, but it is more serious, more psychological, prickly and squirmy, tho' it has it's own sense of humor, and perhaps a bit too honest...I love how at times it's just so absurd...but you know, people with their tangled web of emotions are very often ridiculous when they're young and foolish and full of drama, especially when it comes to love and the fulfillment of our dreams...how we plan out our lives only to have obstacles pop up and send us on a different path...of course, some readers will hate it, some will love it...it depends on how they approach it, if they take it too seriously they'll miss the point...if they think it's too absurd, well...it is what it is, everyone comes to a book with their own tools, I have my way of seeing things...in the end, I have to trust the reader to judge for themselves...

Fishbowl is connected to Dusty Waters and The Fractured Hues of White Light as well, the character, Katharine, emerges again as an influence, and Guthrie Ryder has a small role...Aloysius Farnesworth is there in spirit too...so, the community of characters grows and overlaps much in the way life does...I'm enjoying myself immensely...

I've begun to explore E-books again, tho' I still haven't purchased one of the gadgets as I prefer a solid book made of paper over a gadget that requires batteries (I love reading by candlelight when the power goes out!) Well, I've decided that it wouldn't hurt to make one of the books available...Smashwords seems to be the go to place to get 'em done, but first, I have to strip the PDF down to a basic, format-less Word document... this will take some time...but I'm OCD enough to actually enjoy doing it! I've started with The Fractured Hues of White Light (I'm up to chapter 5) only because it's easier, Dusty Waters has way too many interesting visual bits that required special formatting in it's current form, so I don't know if it's going to be possible to do it and have it look like anything on an e-book device. (I wonder how a book like The House of Leaves looks as an E-book? That one has all kinds of cool bits making it a visual experience.)

(Note: most of this post was written on Sunday morning, intended to post on Sunday afternoon, but I had trouble uploading photos, so I saved the draft, and gave up! So here I am this morning, giving it another try...)

Anyway...the gray skies of the last couple of days have given way to blue again...I don't think the little pale moon will be out there, but the gold finches are busy in the coneflowers...I've finally shook off the cold that I've been battling with for a week, and so it's just allergies again...