Monday, December 13, 2010

Finishing up one project, and starting on another

Well I finished my last read-through of "Christmas at the Holiday Inn" to find the last minute little mistakes this morning.  Then I went over to Kinkos and got it printed up and put it into covers for my family for Christmas.  I'll be posting it here probably on Wednesday.  I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out, considering I had my first idea for it less than two weeks ago.

Now that that is finished, I start the somewhat daunting task of editing "Runaway Train."  The first problem is that the novel is only 40,000 words right now and I'd like it to end up at more like 60,000 words.  There's a lot I CAN add, but I'm interested in finding the best places to add some words.  I need to work on figuring out what the theme is and structure the book towards that end.  I know what the story is, but right now there are several underlying themes and I want to narrow that down to one main theme and work towards that with the book.  The start is a little slow so I want to fix that and get into the meat of the story right away.  Back story can be worked in later.  And of course there is spelling and grammar and punctuation to fix as well. 

I'm hoping to get it sent out to beta readers by the end of January so I've got my work cut out for me.  And, again, let me know if you'd like to be a beta reader for me.

2 comments:

  1. Well done on completing your story :) And you sound like you've got a good idea of how to approach editing "Runaway Train" - I wouldn't worry about word count if I were you, so much as having a read through and identifying places where the story's maybe a bit thin and can use some meatifying, so to speak. :)

    That's what I did with my very first read-through/edit of last year's NaNo. Word count went from 116k to 147k - obviously TOO long, but it was a result of filling in the gaps. Now I'm working on trimming down unnecessary crap, but at least I know there aren't any gaps any longer. :)

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  2. Nice picture! Isn't it a good feeling to have a story in hard copy? Looking forward to reading it!

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