T-Plus 100 Days: The Editing

I’ve been editing.

I’ve been editing the goddamn book, Children of the Pantheon, the first book, since mid-January.

When I went for the whole “Vomit Draft” method of writing, I could average 1500 - 3000 words an hour.

I’ve spent at least eight hours editing the first page of the damn thing. It’s a sort of perfectionism. Maybe.

But enough about that. In Media Res- those sentences above are my way of saying I’m still working at it, I’ve been working at it, I’m frustrated, motivated, at times hopeless and at times moderately, occasionally, pleasantly surprised with a page.

Look at all those goddamn adverbs. Cut the bloody adverbs. That’s the other guy, the editor guy in my pre-frontal asshole, and that’s the sort of stuff he says.

He’s not wrong.

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted. I have to thank a friend, Mo for provoking me to start posting again, who two nights ago at a poetry reading told me the following. I’ll be paraphrasing him here, but I hope the aggressive, well-meaning admonitions he gave me come across. 

“So what’s with the book. Where the fuck are your new posts? Man, what the fuck are you doing?”

“Uh...still writing. Been edit...”

“You know what you did? You fucking strung us out. There’s no payoff. Suddenly, out of nowhere, you stop posting. It’s like watching a reality TV show, you’re so fucking invested and then NOTHING. Where’s the book?”

He said this with a really big smile, he has this way of being aggressive whilst smiling. It’s awesome. I told him I would start posting again.

“Nah dude, you teased us. You fucking teased us. Where’s the pay off?”

Editing is part of writing three books in three months. So why not, why not write about what might be the bleaker part of the whole thing. Where shit gets real. I’m no longer trying to churn out thousands of words a day. I’m going over my Frankenstein’d drafts and trying to fix them, get it all presentable, all the while trying to believe they can be fixed.

After writing the three drafts, I spent about two weeks binging on video games and Netflix. I say binging, but really I replaced the writing with video games and Netflix, and after writing so much so consistently...it felt like binging.

I wrote roughly 180 000 words in roughly 100 days, in three different genres. When I say it like that it’s not so crazy. 1.8k words a day, maybe. Of course, it wasn’t like that. Some days I just wouldn’t write at all. I must have written at least 15k in three days at one point.

So I binged on X-Com. Then I got out my multi-pen and decided I was going to start with editing CoP. 

But man, let’s face it, I’ve always wanted to have that first draft of a novel. Excepting the train wreck of The Sixth (the novel I wrote two years ago that shall not be named), I’ve never had a full first draft of a novel. A manuscript even.

So I printed out the first half in freakin’ Courier New. Like a type writer. Yeah, pure, visceral, nerdy pleasure ensued. I’m not embarrassed. It was fetishistic. 

I was going for that stressed jeans look.  The trick is to shove it into your bag and take it everywhere you go for a month or so.

I took some pleasure in the editing, at first. It’s been another 100 days or so since, however, and I’m still not there. In fact, I realised the ending didn’t work, so I wrote four more chapters. 

I’ve got a lot to blog about still, funnily enough. Like how I’m editing, what I’ve learned from reading some advice on how to do it. Or what the bullshit I’m thinking. My plan is relatively simple though. 

The goal is to get a draft that’s good enough to show about ten people that I want feedback from. 

I spent about 2 months doing the first pass at it. Then I spent two weeks writing more chapters. At some point, I was in Bali and edited maybe half the thing in five days. 

It’s been a bit all over the place.

I got so desperate I randomly sent an extract on a WhatsApp group that had very little to do with my book (my DnD group) with the first two paragraphs and the question, the big one, the one thing that’s bugging the hell out of me:

Is This Compelling?

In other words, would you keep reading?

It’s not great, but I have something, a sort of opening. I told a friend of mine it’s getting to the point where I just want to show somebody, I want to show them the damn book that I’ve worked so much on and just get someone’s head in the world.

So lower down are the first few paragraphs, most likely in the form, I’ll send the ten readers. Most likely. Maybe it's terrible. Maybe I don't know what even counts as compelling. But apparently the first few sentences of Fifty Shades of Grey are: 

I scowl with frustration at myself in the mirror. Damn my hair – it just won’t behave, and damn Katherine Kavanagh for being ill and subjecting me to this ordeal. I should be studying for my final exams, which are next week, yet here I am trying to brush my hair into submission. I must not sleep with it wet. I must not sleep with it wet. Reciting this mantra several times, I attempt, once more, to bring it under control with the brush. I roll my eyes in exasperation and gaze at the pale, brown-haired girl with blue eyes too big for her face staring back at me, and give up.

I hear you El James. I am scowling with frustration. I roll my eyes in exasperation at my own gaze.

If that's compelling, maybe I can do that. Maybe I can write as well as that.

The very rough opening of Book one of Children of the Pantheon: The Exile. I reserve the right to change it all.

1.

The boy knelt on the hot sand, under the shade cast by a God. 

The God hung in the dawn sky like a distant disk, a great, pupiless eye that the kneeling boy averted his gaze from. He could feel it’s shadow, how it cooled the exposed skin of his back where his vest was torn, where the untended holes had grown over time. He did not know the God’s name, not here, in this city, not with their words. They say things here, about Gods. They say the Gods are always watching. He would not turn to look. Instead, he saw the God in his mind’s eye, as he had seen it when it had ceased to move, stopping right over the city. In his blind vision the God was still wreathed in fire, being comparable in size to Luun and Sol, the latter of which it had eclipsed since arriving from the west.

His eyes closed, the boy heard the jab and thrust of approaching conversations. 

Killer without a soul. Exile. 

The loudening insults.

Sandscum. 

Then only the running slap and hiss of sandals upon sand. Now within the range of a tackle, of a heel-to-knee. 

Now fading. 

The insults beginning again at a distance. 

The boy remained on his knees.

He knelt within avast, sand-filled basin; the walled-off training ground which protruded from one corner of the city of Azar, which was itself bulwarked against the winds and wastewalkers of the desert by tall, sun-white outer walls. The city which in it's entirety currently fell under the shadow cast by the looming deity. 

**

Thank you Mo for calling me an asshole.

I forgot how scary it was to post.