Wednesday, January 5, 2011

A Good News/Bad News Situation

I'm a good news first kinda gal, so:

I'm at 3,321/20,000 words for January, on track for my goal. I'm editing Somi and Bresher's second encounter right now, which has led to further tweaking the dialogue in their first. These have always been the hardest scenes for me to write, which I found troubling because, um, it's meant to be a SF romance, so the scenes with them together are kind of important. But I feel like I'm making those scenes much stronger now, and definitely more fun to read.

Now the not-as-good news:

All the dialogue tweaking wound up adding another ~200 words to Act I. So I combed through other scenes looking to cut those words back out. I did it, but sweet fancy Moses it was hard. And I still have that pesky 1,000 words left to cut to get Act I down to the absolute maximum length it can be. There's no way around it; I'm going to have to trash a whole scene. But picking one is agonizing, like deciding which kitten to kill. I think I need to clear my head, and then go back and re-read the whole Act, and see if any one scene jumps out as not moving the story forward, or as something that could be told rather than shown.  Good times.

No comments:

Post a Comment