I finished writing my first draft (hurray!). I was stumbling for a while over a late chapter until I realised that the reason I wasn't making much headway was that the chapter wasn't really needed. The whole thing would be filler, so I cut it. It's obviously missing too, so I think it might be a little enigma for people who take note of these things.
Over the last few nights, and this weekend, I've been through the whole text with my handy red pen (which is neither red, nor a pen) and noted the changes I need to make - unintended spelling or grammatical errors, title changes for characters, etc. On the whole it's a pretty clean text, mostly I think because of the forward planning. The themes come out well, but not too obviously and the little easter eggs I've left in various places work really well.
It's also very spare. Because of the nature of the narrative voice, there's no room for purple prose, so it's mostly stripped down to events and the narrators reflections.
The plan is to make these changes on the typeset version of the text and then send the whole lot to Lulu for a very short print run for my beta testers. No idea what Lulu's turnaround is, but I'm looking forward to handing out actual books to friends and family and getting their impressions. I just hope they don't all hate it.
I was very happy reading it. I think I've judged the language development very well.
No comments:
Post a Comment