Happiness

...is when you take about 90 manuscript pages of indefinable mess in the middle, extract the pieces you can use, and realize you've likely cut about 50 pages. Not that that won't be added toward the end, where there exist Big Gaps. But large swaths have been cut out of the Vast Questionable. Honestly, you look at that stuff and wonder how in hell you could have ever thought it was any good.

Bad news--the 40 pages I keep will require extensive revision. Almost ground floor.

Good news--linking together the chapters and counting pages reveals the happy fact that I am at the arithmetic halfway point, which means I have more wriggle room than I thought.

I'm going to be scarce here and elsewhere for a while. Have to be. No choice. Because I can't take as long to rewrite the second half of this damned millstone as I did to rewrite the first.

Of course, if I could channel jaylake for a week, I'd be in clover...

Happiness

...is when you take about 90 manuscript pages of indefinable mess in the middle, extract the pieces you can use, and realize you've likely cut about 50 pages. Not that that won't be added toward the end, where there exist Big Gaps. But large swaths have been cut out of the Vast Questionable. Honestly, you look at that stuff and wonder how in hell you could have ever thought it was any good.

Bad news--the 40 pages I keep will require extensive revision. Almost ground floor.

Good news--linking together the chapters and counting pages reveals the happy fact that I am at the arithmetic halfway point, which means I have more wriggle room than I thought.

I'm going to be scarce here and elsewhere for a while. Have to be. No choice. Because I can't take as long to rewrite the second half of this damned millstone as I did to rewrite the first.

Of course, if I could channel jaylake for a week, I'd be in clover...

Architects vs engineers

This will be on the short side, as most of my posts about writing are.

I think I should turn in my Intellectual ID card, if I ever really had one to begin with, because when I start reading essays like this and this, my gaze slides off the page/screen every few sentences and starts looking for the memes/cartoons/gutter margins. I can't maintain the interest, even though I suppose definitions of genre should interest me--genre is my preference to read, and I do write the stuff. But gods help me, I quickly reach the point that I don't fucking care. I write it--here it is--call it spec fic and be done with it. Better yet, call it Fiction. It pays better.

OTOH, show me stuff like this, and I could wax rhapsodic and rattle on for days, because I love to talk about the structure of story itself. Archetypes, the stepwise build to the climactic moment, the twists and turns of plot. The choices characters make. The turn of a tale on a single line, or word, or in a movie, expression. The structure of the thing itself, and not the skin in which it's dressed and presented to the world. Utilities rather than windows. Floor load rather than facade. Engineering rather than architecture. Both aspects are necessary to construct the whole--I'm not arguing one over the other. But I have a bend, a preference. Whether it affects what I write and how, I don't know. I suspect it might.

Architects vs engineers

This will be on the short side, as most of my posts about writing are.

I think I should turn in my Intellectual ID card, if I ever really had one to begin with, because when I start reading essays like this and this, my gaze slides off the page/screen every few sentences and starts looking for the memes/cartoons/gutter margins. I can't maintain the interest, even though I suppose definitions of genre should interest me--genre is my preference to read, and I do write the stuff. But gods help me, I quickly reach the point that I don't fucking care. I write it--here it is--call it spec fic and be done with it. Better yet, call it Fiction. It pays better.

OTOH, show me stuff like this, and I could wax rhapsodic and rattle on for days, because I love to talk about the structure of story itself. Archetypes, the stepwise build to the climactic moment, the twists and turns of plot. The choices characters make. The turn of a tale on a single line, or word, or in a movie, expression. The structure of the thing itself, and not the skin in which it's dressed and presented to the world. Utilities rather than windows. Floor load rather than facade. Engineering rather than architecture. Both aspects are necessary to construct the whole--I'm not arguing one over the other. But I have a bend, a preference. Whether it affects what I write and how, I don't know. I suspect it might.