Onwardly

Short one tonight, lovelies.

I worked on revising Genius tonight, inspired by Stephen King's book On Writing, which I finished this evening. I got through 43 pages of pretty close revision, going through a cup of coffee and two cups of tea and some slightly stale crackers in the process, working first at Pergolesi and then at the dining room table (the chairs are really great for writing in).

I slashed a lot of adverbs tonight (the weird title of this entry is an homage to those casualties of revision). I rearranged a lot of prepositional phrases. Hordes of passive voice fell beneath my sword. I killed one of my darlings, quite literally-- I had a character who should have died, but I really liked him, so I shuffled him out of the novel in a rather dumb, contrived way. Well, a page of cross-outs and a sentence of rewriting solved that. He's properly dead now. No sequel or spin-offs for him.

The middle third of this novel sucked pretty hard (it blows. it should go to hell). I rewrote just about every word, tossed scenes, wrote new ones. I don't know why it sucked so much... a lot of it seemed like filler and stage direction, boring crap, just a dusty road that had to be traveled. So I fixed it up, integrated it more smoothly, made it sorta suspenseful and got it to contribute to the novel as a whole.

And those bits that truly didn't need to be there... I axed. There's a strange exhilaration to X-ing out a whole page of prose with two pen-strokes. I want to compare it to kicking down a sand castle... but I think it's more like pruning back a rose to keep the plant healthy.

The last third of the book is holding up pretty well, though. Only 42 pages left to revise, and it's almost entirely really cool stuff coming up. I'm looking forward to reading it. And making it better.

On Writing is good. I mean, most of the technical stuff is pretty basic, really. King doesn't get nearly as rarefied as John Gardner or my instructors at Clarion (though some of his advice is surprisingly direct and helpful). The bits about his life (and the book's about two-thirds autobiography) are neat, too. I enjoyed reading it, and if it didn't teach me much about how to write better (because I've had those same lessons before), it certainly reminded me of how fun and restorative and exhilarating fiction writing can be. A good book about writing should make you itch to write, and this one did that for me, so I say it's good.

My old girlfriend Adrienne (also known as Blah) called from Boone tonight to wish me a merry so-and-so. She's writing her second children's book (her first one, which is totally brilliant, is making the rounds to publishers) and next spring she's taking the same 10-day workshop with Orson Scott Card that I took back in '96. I'm glad she's writing so much. She's a terrific writer.

No socializing tonight, really, beyond some coffee and conversation with Scott. We're always comparing the worlds of sf writing and professional science. The parallels are many and surprising. I had a message from Lynne when I got home, inviting me to have a belated birthday beer with her... but I couldn't find her number (I mean, I used to live on her floor, and then right downstairs from her; why would I ever learn her number? And Scott was at work so I couldn't ask him), and in the message she said she was going out with friends in a bit anyway, and she'd left the message an hour before I got home... anyway. Sorry, Lynne, if you're reading this-- I didn't mean to dis you! We can have even-more-belated birthday beer soon...

This week is going by fast. That's good. Only 2 weeks until Meg arrives. :)