Update: Ongoing Revision

Okay, so primary revision is an ongoing thing, I’m sure that won’t surprise you.

The big news, sort of, is that I have now cut … let me see … about 45,000 words total, counting the stuff I trimmed when I removed characters and reduced the roles of other characters and so forth. ALL at the sentence and paragraph level. It’s kind of amazing!

Still ongoing: I have a good many notes. I’m going through the notes and doing the things. Some of this is ultra simple. “Make sure Character A is plainly physically competent from the beginning,” say, because Character A does something important in chapter 27 that depends on physical competence of this type, so it’s important that this doesn’t come out of nowhere. Other things are more complicated. “Build Character B into a real character” is simple to say, but obviously it’s not quite as simple to make it happen. But it needs to happen.

Personally, I do the easiest, most straightforward revision first and then the more demanding and annoying revision. It will be a few days … or a week … before I get to the annoying stuff.

However, by this time NEXT week, I hope I will be able to report that I’ve sent the full manuscript to the earliest readers.

Meanwhile! Cool Genetics Weirdness:

I planted these two trees myself. I collected the buckeyes from a specific little red buckeye tree in town about, I don’t know, 20 years ago, 25 years ago, a good long time. This parent tree looks basically identical to this one here. I planted these buckeyes I collected, and they grew. Take a look:

This red buckeye is about two feet high. It is a sprawling unkempt shrubby thing. It is indeed twenty or twenty-five years old, so this is the actual mature form of this “tree.” It is a sister tree of this one:

This tree was grown from a buckeye collected at the same exact time, from the same parent. It was planted at the same time. It is the same age. I am not making this up. I grew both these trees myself. I do suspect — but I don’t know — that these two trees have different male parents. There’s a white buckeye in town about a mile from the red buckeye from which I collected the seeds. Buckeyes do hybridize rather freely, like many trees.

So … if you want a red buckeye, wow, I suggest you buy one from a good nursery, because heaven only knows what you’ll get if you collect a random buckeye and plant it. BUT, should you collect a buckeye and plant it, I bet it will grow, and you can have the excitement of not having a clue whether you’ll get a 24-inch tree or one that grows, slowly, to 40 feet — which is probably going to turn out to be the final height of my bigger tree.

Please Feel Free to Share:

The post Update: Ongoing Revision appeared first on Rachel Neumeier.