Second draft
May. 22nd, 2007 05:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperanceI've been working over the SF novella for a week now. Not intensively, granted, because I did a lot of travelling and gigging in that same week; but intensely, with focus. It is amazingly slow going for a rewrite, just a handful of pages every hour, grindingly hard. I'm a third of the way through now, and if you just looked at it, the two versions side by side, you'd barely know I'd done anything. Word count has hardly changed. If you read it - well, an alert reader would spot where the words are significantly different, but there aren't so many examples of that. Mostly I've been refining, or perhaps comparing first text to refined vision, and reworking where the two don't match; but you'd need to be well attuned to the genre, I think, to agree with me that the second draft is better. It's not conspicuous.
And what I'm not doing is what I usually spend most of my time on at this stage, which is developing/refining the voice. Especially with a first-person narrative, as this is. I don't like his voice, at least as an aspect of my not liking him; he's opinionated, self-absorbed, distancing. I worry that he might be dull. I worry, indeed, that I may have produced another novella that no one will want to publish. And that's on top/by the side of worrying about the SFnal credibility of it all. Damn, I hate depending on other people's judgements...
And what I'm not doing is what I usually spend most of my time on at this stage, which is developing/refining the voice. Especially with a first-person narrative, as this is. I don't like his voice, at least as an aspect of my not liking him; he's opinionated, self-absorbed, distancing. I worry that he might be dull. I worry, indeed, that I may have produced another novella that no one will want to publish. And that's on top/by the side of worrying about the SFnal credibility of it all. Damn, I hate depending on other people's judgements...