February's Writing Progress
I finished the second draft of Stone & Silence on 4th February and started the third draft on 6th. I'm now about four-fifths of the way through that. I've cut about 12,500 words from the second draft, and the book now stands at 124,000 words. Every time I get to this stage in writing a book, I'm amazed at how much fluff crept into the first draft, and how obvious it is when I start looking for it.
I usually tell people that my second draft is for structure or "big picture" items - plot and character arcs - and my third draft is for language and style - I've figured out what I want to say, now I have to say it in the best and fewest words possible. In practice, there's a lot of overlap between those phases.
At the moment, I'm focused on culling the words that my critique group tell me that I use too much (like "that" and "like"). My editing program has a mode that allows me to highlight all occurrences of these words, so when I see a lot of red on the screen, I know I have some work to do. I don't always remove excess occurrences of these words, but seeing a lot of red often prompts me to ask whether there's a better way to write that passage. There usually is :-)
This highlight mode also displays dialogue in a different colour from the rest of the text, which makes sections with a lot of dialogue or a lot of narrative stand out. Those are likely to be lazy writing, or have pacing problems.
It should be going to beta readers in the next week or two. Unless they find any massive problems, I should be on-track for a release in April.
I usually tell people that my second draft is for structure or "big picture" items - plot and character arcs - and my third draft is for language and style - I've figured out what I want to say, now I have to say it in the best and fewest words possible. In practice, there's a lot of overlap between those phases.
At the moment, I'm focused on culling the words that my critique group tell me that I use too much (like "that" and "like"). My editing program has a mode that allows me to highlight all occurrences of these words, so when I see a lot of red on the screen, I know I have some work to do. I don't always remove excess occurrences of these words, but seeing a lot of red often prompts me to ask whether there's a better way to write that passage. There usually is :-)
This highlight mode also displays dialogue in a different colour from the rest of the text, which makes sections with a lot of dialogue or a lot of narrative stand out. Those are likely to be lazy writing, or have pacing problems.
It should be going to beta readers in the next week or two. Unless they find any massive problems, I should be on-track for a release in April.
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