What a week. Using the road map I made for myself last week, I finally gritted my way through a very difficult rewrite, pushing East of Yesterday up to over 100,000 words. Then I started cutting scenes that had become either redundant or irrelevant after the rewrite, and chopped it down to 97,000 words. And now I’m back up to 99,000 with nothing but blank pages before me.
And right now, that’s a beautiful thing. I don’t have blank page syndrome–I had full page syndrome. I had page after page of irrelevancy and redundancy, with tiny dollops here and there of stuff I needed to keep. I was daunted at the thought of straightening it all out. But I pressed on and pressed through, and now I can see the end in sight.
One thing I keep running into is what I call temporal inconsistencies. I don’t do a lot of twisting time in knots–because it’s really difficult to follow–but what little I do has to be consistent from either end of time. It’s hard to explain. You’ll have to read it for yourself. Well, I caught myself writing in an inconsistency when I was going to have someone warn someone else about something he has already done, but has yet to do. And then I realized the warning made no sense. And then I realized that it could make sense, if I just tweaked it a little bit.
Here’s a snip, from Mike’s point-of-view. He’s talking to his friend, Brad. It starts with Mike.
“Wait. Did you say you were going to ride home with him?”
“Yup. All the way to 1975. Remember that weird problem I had back then? When you said I’d been in a fight, but I really wasn’t?”
“Yeah?”
“Well, you described a guy that looked a lot like this Lysander cat. I don’t know what I did, but I guess I’ll find out, right? And we do know I pop him a good one and he’s down for the count?”
“Well … yeah.”
“So you head back to the 20s and hang tight. I’ll misdirect him back to the 70s, use my Good Knight on him, and I’ll be back before you get home.”
“But how—“
“Look, I can’t stay—they think I’m out to take a piss. Just get out of here, for the love of God. They’re still looking for Adele.”
And he ran off into the night.
The Good Knight is what he calls is famous (or infamous) right jab.
It’s fun to write. And I’m hoping it’s fun to read as well. 🙂
Oh! Now I know what that humming is… I thought my ears were ringing again.
Cute scene. I love the whole “drive by” feel of it.
Thank you! “Drive by” is actually quite apt.
I’m glad that was easy to tweak. {Smile}
Maybe this is just me, but I find that a lot of “major rewrites” I expect to have to do aren’t nearly as long and complicated when I actually get into revising them as I’m sure they will be before I start. {wink, Smile}
A.E.B.
I spent a good amount of time wading through this one. I had the scenes all written and realized that they didn’t work. So I had to transplant the info I needed to the new scenes. It was a big task. 🙂
But you got it done. That’s the important thing in the end. {Smile}
A.E.B.
P.S. That snip looks pretty good now. {Smile}
A.E.B.
Thanks!