Heart of a Traitor 1/2 complete

Hit a huge milestone today. The rewrite for Heart of a Traitor is 1/2 complete. It's all downhill from here, or so it is said. It is quite an experience rewriting a book I haven't looked at in nearly a decade. On the one hand, I've had quite a lot of positive moments when I realize how much I have grown as a writer since then, taking scenes that were good and making them excellent.

However, I've also had quite a lot of "holy crap what was I thinking" moments. Especially with the sci-fi jargon! Oh...my...heck, I don't know why I included so much techno-babble back then. Maybe I had picked up by osmosis some really bad habits from watching too much Star Trek, or maybe I thought it was required or something and people would miss it if it wasn't there, like the "it's a small world" ride at Disneyland.

Anyway, if this were being done on paper I would have already depleted three red markers by now with all the techno-babble I have eliminated. The story is now character focused, which makes for a better read, I think.
After all, the first and most basic rule of writing is (or at least should be) that the reader has to care about the characters. If they don't care about the characters, then they certainly aren't going to care about the conflict, the world, its history, or anything else. All the drama, tension, anticipation, sympathy, etc. Basically, anything the reader feels while reading can only happen if they first care about the characters.

Wanna' see an example?

Oh, I TOTALLY shouldn't be doing this, but I can't resist. You guys are never going to respect me after this, but I can't help myself. Okay, let me grab something out of the overflowing waste bin of sci-fi jargon that is no longer in the book:


“Hardly,” she commented. My bodies’ cellular-stasis is reset daily by immaterial induction.”
Don Kielter looked at her with a furrowed brow.
“Didn’t you ever attend open-temple days for the Verussiah?” she asked. “I thought that was required for the nobles on Ardura.” Don Kielter shook his head slowly.
“I hate dumbing things down,” she sighed. “Okay, where does a thought go after you have it?”
His expression of confusion only deepened. He looked as if he were watching a small animal crawl of her mouth.
“In the ether, matter is intangible, and thoughts are tangible. The ether is a reflection of the thoughts of all sentient life. Have you ever heard of the galactic-mirror dogma?”
Don Kielter shook his head slowly. Nariko rolled her eyes.
“Both realities actually occupy the same space, but ether matter is phased at the autrino-level, so the two normally don’t interact, except in living things, which bridge the gap between the two realities. As a living thing, you have both a physical body, and an ether aural body, which separate at death.”



Ugh, just look at all that mess! It's a disaster!

It doesn't really mean anything to the reader, it barely gives any useful information about the way this world works, it certainly doesn't mean anything scientifically. It's just me wasting the reader's time by imitating the way scientists talk. It's like watching a puppet show in serbian.

(PLEASE LET ME EMPHASIZE THAT I HAVE GOTTEN MUCH BETTER AT WRITING SINCE 2001, SO PLEASE DON'T JUDGE ME BY THIS STANDARD)

Okay, back to work, and by work I mean playing Mario Party 9 with my daughter who has been patiently waiting for me while i wrote this.