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syncategorematic Jan. 1st, 2008 08:32 pm)
syncategorematic Jan. 1st, 2008 08:32 pm)It is an auspicious beginning to the new year: although I'd like to say it was the first thing I did this morning, I have to admit to indulging in many of my usual timewasters and a few new ones (fireworks over the London Eye, even on video, oh beautiful agony...) But now I am back to my first love, my true love, what I shall keep doing continually (and, mentally, continuously) for as long as I live...
Editing, of course.
:-P
There is a Google Doc with a rather lengthy section from the middle of a novel in it. I had neglected it for a while --- six months, Google Docs' revision history specifies, but it doesn't tell me the date. I cannot remember when I last worked on it. I'd like to believe it was before the end of June.
A lot of things happened between the end of June and the beginning of January. I was afraid, coming back to reread that section, those scenes and that dialogue, that it will sound silly now, stupid, ignorant in the face of all that I now know.
I smiled as I reread it. I made a few corrections here and there. But they were of grammar and sentence structure. The characters remained vivid and real in my head, and what they cared for and what they loved --- and how --- still remained acceptable in my world of six months later. I was right more often than I was wrong. Bless you, twenty years of storytelling discipline --- and bless you, Goddess of vivid dreams. But that story has the most vivid individual characters that have ever come into my head wholesale, rather than being built up on plot and parts of myself or emerging gradually.
Some of them now remind me of people I have met since.
Editing, of course.
:-P
There is a Google Doc with a rather lengthy section from the middle of a novel in it. I had neglected it for a while --- six months, Google Docs' revision history specifies, but it doesn't tell me the date. I cannot remember when I last worked on it. I'd like to believe it was before the end of June.
A lot of things happened between the end of June and the beginning of January. I was afraid, coming back to reread that section, those scenes and that dialogue, that it will sound silly now, stupid, ignorant in the face of all that I now know.
I smiled as I reread it. I made a few corrections here and there. But they were of grammar and sentence structure. The characters remained vivid and real in my head, and what they cared for and what they loved --- and how --- still remained acceptable in my world of six months later. I was right more often than I was wrong. Bless you, twenty years of storytelling discipline --- and bless you, Goddess of vivid dreams. But that story has the most vivid individual characters that have ever come into my head wholesale, rather than being built up on plot and parts of myself or emerging gradually.
Some of them now remind me of people I have met since.