Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Because time waits for no man...


I'm stepping up my efforts to finish THE MOSQUITO VINE. If I'm going to blow off high-paying jobs for it, I may as well start taking it more seriously. One of the things I learned from NaNoWriMo, is that I can get a ton of work done...if I treat it...well, like work!

So, I got up today and finished the first edit on pages 1-50. Tonight I'm taking 51-70something with me to work on. My goal is to have all this editing done ASAP so I can finish the damn thing soon.

How is it so far? Well as I go deeper into it, I'm finding more things to fix or change. I'm killing a lot of adverbs (I have no idea why I use so many adverbs). This problem was first pointed out to me by my friends Mike and Paul, who told me I was "adverb crazy." This made me really self-conscious of the problem, but oddly enough...I still do it when I'm writing. I'll just pile them up, until there is a nice little pyramid-stack of "-ly" descriptors. Ugh.

For the most part, I'm still really pleased with it. I know there is a 25-30 page chapter (written over Thanksgiving in New Mexico) that's going to have to be parred down, and frankly--I'm looking forward to getting to that. But last night, I finished editing/reading Chapter 1, and it ends with this great kicker (that I forgot all about) and I was floating--yes, floating the rest of the night I was so pleased with it. So that's good.

5 comments:

Dave said...

Yay! One step closer!

Dave said...

And what the heck ever happened to the friday video blog?

Jason said...

Yep. I'm slowly getting my arse in gear.

Please see above posting.

Anonymous said...

I'm really eager to read this manuscript...

Jason said...

And I'm eager for you to READ it!!! All of you!!!

But I think it's still at least a few months off. I made a ton of progress today at work (there were no basketball games, for a change).

Leah will probably be the first person to get a peek, since she has the whole proximity thing goin' for her.