Guys. Guys!
Another Nanothingy post: my goal for this month isn’t to make word count, it’s to make word count (very doable) plus edit the draft so the story is in good enough shape to send to the beta readers (high-pitched not-so-doable scream).* So I’m crunching on the MAKER SPACE edits and I’ve got this part over here, and that part over there, and they do not want to go together. I’ve done everything I can to them short of grinding down the edges and using a welding torch, and they just will not align. We’re talking magnets with polar opposites here, guys.
And then I remembered a very, very rough first draft of the third Rachel Peng novel I wrote several years ago. I dug it out, dusted it off, and there were about 1000 words that flipped entire thing around and locked the pieces together. I’m working with a whole now, and that is much better than working with parts that maybe-sort-of belong together because the characters have the same names.
I suppose if any writers read this blog, I actually have one piece of advice for you and it is: NEVER THROW ANYTHING AWAY. It’s not dead! It’s just on life support until you return it to its native home and then it leaps out of the spring trap, wild and free.
* And after I get the feedback from the beta readers, I do some more editing, then copy-edit the entire thing (which is what I do for a living and I am GOOD at it), and then I send it to my own copy editor, who then destroys it because you cannot copy-edit your own work. So I guess I have two pieces of writing advice for you, and the second is “HIRE A COPY EDITOR”.
K.B. SPANGLER 