WIP-it Wednesday: February 10th, 2016

Time for a new weekly writer’s roundup of my works-in-progress and those ready to read!

Snow and ice have reasserted their presence in my corner of the planet after a mild stretch of winter. My weekend was bordered by a pair of storms Friday and Monday that made my Saturday and Tuesday interesting “clean-up and catch-up” days. However, I avoided cabin fever spending an evening with friends and then another watching one of my favorite films for a winter storm…

The little break was good for me, and I returned to my top-to-bottom rewrite of A Contract in Azure and Indigo in force on Sunday. As of today, it nears completion as I wade into the last eighteen-hundred words of the piece.

Holly-smokes, what a bear of a job it has been! I was really naive thinking this would be a single weekend project… It’s now been three weekends and I’m still not done with it! I’ve shrunk the story in places and grown it in others. Overburdened descriptions have been trimmed (sometimes hacked), points of view have been fixed (particularly poor omniscient narration like “she was a sea of turbulent emotions”, etc.), and dialogue has been revised-expanded for better characterization and clarity.

Azure and Indigo was written just fifteen months ago, but when I started editing it I didn’t realize how far I had come as a writer in a little over a year. However, soon after I looked at this old piece of work I realized how much I had grown… and found a story in MAJOR need of an overhaul in the process. The edit became a rewrite, working in all that I have learned so far to give the tale the voice I have begun to develop.

The piece is looking to end-up being around fifteen-thousand words long after the rewrite, compared to the original fourteen-thousand. I’m happy with that. And happy with the fact that the original plot is ninety-five percent intact. My goal was to present and tell the existing story better, not change it… Keeping the wordcount relatively the same gives me additional confidence that I’ve been true to that goal. Once it’s done, I’ll see if my alpha readers and others familiar with the original version feel the same!

In other news, I posted the first chapter of The Brynesmark Saturday on Aethereal Engines! The reaction to the opener was great, with a lot of readers expressing anticipation for the next installment. :-) That was really nice to hear, and I don’t think that the next chapter, The Brume, will disappoint! It’s the shortest of the six chapters that comprise the piece, being a little shy of two-thousand words… however, it answers several questions from the first chapter while opening new ones. ;-) Because of its modest length, I’m not going to post an excerpt this week for fear of spoiling too much. If you’re eager for the next part you’ll just have to wait until Saturday morning when it gets posted! ;-)

Alright, time for me to stop blogging and get back to writing some more fiction! Take care!