Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Plowing

About one-third of the way through the intense revision/completion of "Unearthed," a tale that has crept up to 18K words. There will be some additions, but some trimming is ahead, too, so I don't expect the total to be too far from 18K. Finally having time to work on the thing, I'm moving through line-by-line and not leaving anything for my future self to have to figure out, which means I have to solve any problems now. (I've put off quite a few decisions, I'm finding; thanks, past self!)

I am, meanwhile, reading Paul Cody's So Far Gone (which will make or break itself in its final quarter; I'm reading Cody because he was the editor who selected a story of mine for the next issue of Stone Canoe), All Things Shining by Dreyfus and Kelly (which may be moving a bit too swiftly through the history of Western thought to be completely credible), and Mishna Wolff's incredibly funny I'm Down (the true story of a poor (literally) little white girl who lacks are cred with her black neighbors, but whose father, white though he is, moves with ease in the black community).

In other quasi-news, a Los Angeles–based producer is working with me to get my story "Clockworks" attached to some people in the business of making movies; there's no money in our agreement, at this stage, but if he manages to find a buyer, I'll let you know.

4 comments:

Calvin said...

Keep at it! That's interesting news about "Clockworks."

And Merry Christmas to you and your family.

(Now I guess I'd better get to writing, too...)

William Preston said...

Yessireebob, you'd better keep a-writing as well!

Merry Christmas to you and yours, my friend.

Unknown said...

Merry Christmas. Good luck with your revisions. I'm curious, your revisions are actually increasing the word count?

William Preston said...

Merry Christmas to you as well, Unknown.

Part of my revision process is seeing where I need to expand. Perhaps I put in place the dialogue for a scene, but didn't fully set the scene. Or my rereading reveals to me a spot where some grace notes, touching on some earlier motif or better setting up something that's to come, are needed. There are also those aforementioned unsolved problems that I left for my future self, such as how exactly some event should unfold or how much someone should say about something. In my earlier uncertainty, I just leave a space or write a series of sentence fragments or paraphrase some possibilities. There should be some trims ahead, as uncertainty about approach in some scenes led me to try something from several angles and leave all of those approaches in place.