Day 2 of The Year-End Project

[lagilman]

Goal: to have 50k words in polished working order by 1 January.

Day 1: got the errata, notes, and existing text imported into Scrivener.  Created a character call-sheet.
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Started working on part 1, chapter 1 this morning. Mainly, I'm reading it out loud to myself, and changing as I go until it flows properly.

Example:

this:

Placing the pencil carefully at the top of the drafting table, in the narrow niche carved for exactly that purpose, John Mason reached for the clean white rag hanging on a hook at the edge of the table, and wiped his hands, careful to rub the smudges off each finger with studied precision.

went to this:

He placed the pencil carefully in the narrow niche carved into the drafting table for exactly that purpose, then reached for a clean cloth rag and wiped his hands, careful to rub the smudges off each finger with studied precision.

Managed to get through all of chapter one today. 7,600 words (revised, not all new.)

Words of oncoming doom: "John Mason had no real desire to change the world: he was passing fond of it the way it was. "


And now I believe it is wine o'clock.  And I should probably eat a meal not-at-my-desk.

Comments

[princejvstin.livejournal.com]

Eat, then wine. :)

Thanks for sharing this.

[damiana-swan.livejournal.com]

Huh, interesting. The first version reads as the character is significantly OCD, probably to the point of a diagnosis and treatment. The second one merely reads as, mm, focused.

And yes, some not-at-your-desk time is definitely in order. Just ask the cats.

[lagilman]

And yet, all I really did was change one portion of the sentence, reducing the emphasis on the pencil-niche and redirecting it to the character.

"He placed," rather than "placing it in the..."

Words. It's sometimes more about how we read them than what they actually say. :-)

[mevennen.livejournal.com]

This was slightly skewed for me because a friend of ours is called John Mason!