Through the muck and the mire...

So first off, apologies for the down time between posts.  Between Christmas, work and the fact that I've had a terribly bad, weird face headache thing for the past several days that has had me all hopped up on meds and unable to sleep most nights, blogging has been one of the last things on my mind.  But it's almost New Years and then I mean to buckle back down on my somewhat neglected writing and get to work.

So "The Plan" has me finishing my editing of Runaway Train by the end of January but it is very difficult going right now.  I don't really know how to edit and it is much too short so I'm still trying to figure out what to add.  Some of it I have figured out but I'm fighting every step of the way not to get drawn into a shiny new project that would be much more fun than the muck and mire of editing this novel.

But on a slightly brighter note, I found a novel I want to adapt into a screenplay.  I've been hunting for sometime for a novel in the public domain that I could write a screenplay from, and I finally found it.  The book (*shakes a bit with fear at the thought that someone might steal her idea*) is "Rilla of Ingleside", the last of the Anne of Green Gables books.  It follows Rilla Blythe, Anne's youngest teenaged daughter, through life on the home front of World War I Canada.  It was always my favorite of the Anne books and I think it would make a fabulous movie.  I don't know where adapting that will fit into my writing schedule, but we'll see.

Well, I'm off to heat up some leftover green bean casserole for lunch, so fare you well.

Beginning the Editing Process

So first off, I apoligize for the delay in posting.  I have been quite busy lately with work and various Christmas activities.

I really began to get into the editing process for Runaway Train tonight.  I wanted to start last week but I didn't really know where to begin so I went to Barnes and Noble and flipped through a few books on editing to get a feel for what I needed to work on, and then kind of played around with a few different things to get a feel for what I liked.  One book said that writing initially is about the plot, about what is actually happening in the story, and editing is about the subtext, about bringing out the unspoken ideas that are the undercurrent of the novel.  So I've been delving into my character's motivations, what they really want and how what one of them wants, colides with what the other wants.  It's been a little bit difficult for me since it is a post-apocalyptic novel so for all practical purposes, there are only two characters and no real antagonist.  But I've come to realize that each of the characters is the antagonist for the other, since they both ultimatly want the same thing, but the way one of them gets there clashes with the way the other one does.

So after trying a few things to figure out where I need to add to my story, I finally wrote out a sort of outline for the subplot of my novel, which is a romance story, about the path that each character takes to figure out that he or she is in love.  In a nutshell, the female main character, Katy Jo, has to find herself before she can fall in love with Joshua, the male main character.  She has to find out what she wants in a man, and adjust her ideas of what a perfect man really is.  Joshua, on the other hand, knows he is in love with Katy Jo almost right off the bat but the more he tries to become the man she wants, the farther he gets from being himself.

So now that I've mapped out the subplot, I'm going to integrate that into my originally outline and figure out which main plot scenes can support subplot themes as well.  Once that is done, I'll go back through my novel and rewrite/add scenes as necessary to incorporate all of the different areas.  Hopefully that will all be done by the end of January although I'm starting to think that might have been a bit ambitious.  But we'll see.

Also, thank you all for reading my Christmas story.  The first few copies went out to my family today, so we'll see how they like it.