Clean Up Editing
Future grumbling Jeffrey has become present day Jeffrey—I’ve switched to doing some clean up editing.
I had a great April in terms of wordcount. I was targeting a wordcount of 10k, but finished the month at 18k and I estimate that I’m about 60-70% of the way through the first half of the second act. But all that progress as come at a cost.
I view drafting the same as riding a motorcycle, things are more stable the faster you go. I try not to stop drafting once I start, so that means not letting small pesky details get in the way. So, like naming a space station or a key medicine will get treated like this: “They arrived at (name) space station where the next dose of (stuff) was waiting for them.”
The problem, of course, is eventually after 20k+ words like that, there are a lot of parentheses that need to be filled in. Some are more important than others, but the cumulative effect as I plow on is a growing sense of: oh man, that’s gonna suck. Plus, I find myself less anchored in the world when things like that aren’t named. And that was the real problem. Things need to come together in the second half of the second act, and those seeds are really developed in the first half of the second act. So, I need to detail those things to get a firm grasp on them.
I switched to doing an editing pass yesterday with an eye to clean stuff up and fill in those details. I’m not going to do a character or plot analysis yet of this section–I’ll wait until after I write the midpoint for that. I’m targeting this clean up editing to take about three weeks and I hope to be back to drafting again before June.