The Edits Shall Continue Until Morale Improves…

Thanks to some company this weekend, I managed to wiggle out another chunk of editing. This particular scene has been taking me a bit longer than I thought it would, but I was able to finally get over the hump on Saturday. One of those things where my brain understands the concept just fine, but getting the words down and making it work correctly is a bit of a bear.

In the end I had to just stop trying to make it perfect and get the bones down.

For me, this means a lot of stilted dialog and crappy dialog tags:

“Blah blah blah blah,” I muttered snarkily, doing something that’s probably going to get cut next pass.


“Blah blah, blah blah blah blah,” he pointed out, making smexy eyes at me.


“But blah blah! How else am I going to be able to Comshock with the Groosalugg?”  My mouth pursed as I made an astute observation while tapping my fingers on the table.

And so on and so forth. I tend to use far too many “mutters” and “murmurs”. It’s a bad habit I ended up with after playing in a few pbps. It’s okay for online games since no one really cares there, but in a book it’s bound to be pretty irritating, though some of it may just be part of my personal style. But I know I’m going to go back to clean it up, so for getting the quick and dirty concept down it’s good enough. I’ve noticed I don’t always tend to use too many good descriptions with this sort of writing either, but again, that will come later.

I’m continuing to feel pretty good about where things are headed. I’ve got one more chapter/scene of stuff that’s nearly totally new, and then it will be back to tweaking – until the end, at least. There’s some fairly interesting changes happening there too, but I don’t want to rush ahead, since so much of this other stuff is changing as I go along.

And on a totally awesome note? I got my first advance check in the mail on Saturday. Makes it all worth while. 😉