I once bought my husband a book entitled “Mistakes and Errors in Surgery” written a long time ago but fascinating in its dissection of typical surgical errors.\u00a0 And I love the title.\u00a0 The sound of it, the rhythm and mouth-feel of the words.\u00a0 Da-DUM, da-DUM-da, da-DUM-da-da.\u00a0\u00a0 (Yes, some writers hear\/feel word sequences like this.)<\/p>\n
So last night was an example of mistakes and errors in writing on a computer.\u00a0 I had finished (probably) the last\u00a0 edits on a story called “Final Honors” which is not a sequel to the previous story with a major character but a distant echo…seven years later, nothing in between written (yet.)\u00a0\u00a0 Still frustrated that MS Word does not include an e-acute-accent in its “special characters” you can insert, and also does not include a u-circumflex–both of which my previous Word had in its list–I wondered if those were available from the keyboard itself in some way.\u00a0 A combination of Control with a vowel, or maybe one of the function keys with something, so I skipped several pages\u00a0 and tried out a few things.\u00a0 That was a huge mistake.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 CTRL with lower case a deleted the story and the backup with the same name and a different time-stamp, and the other backup with the same name and a different time-stamp.\u00a0 Gone.\u00a0 I still had the drafts with a *different* filename\u00a0 but the longest of those was about half the length of the final.\u00a0 OOPS.\u00a0 I retrieved the longest, and quickly wrote a precis of the missing part–I couldn’t hope to replace 3000 words word for word, and trying to do so will blue memory of the plot itself…even that took hours (and the help of Beethoven, because that second half of the story had been written to three Beethoven symphonies, each offering a mood-tone that worked for that part of the story.<\/p>\n
Along about 2 in the morning, with my brain seizing up no matter how many times I played the 3rd (Eroica) from the funeral march on, I gave up and went to bed, telling myself firmly that I needed to treat this as an opportunity to write a *better* story, rather than grieve over the Truly Stupendous Powerful Story now gone forever, and went to bed.\u00a0 Woke up tired, stiff as a board, and dabbled with it today, still not ready to tackle it again.\u00a0 It’s not on deadline or anything, so letting it sit and marinate isn’t all that bad.<\/p>\n
This afternoon, still tired and in need of sleep, I started to go down for a nap when the phone rang.\u00a0 And lo! it was my agent.\u00a0 And lo! he wanted to talk about Horngard!\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And all the story-writing I’ve done since the latest head-bang has really cleared my brain’s plot-thingie (used to be my plot daemon and I really wish he’d come back because he was fun, but I now have a modernized version, smooth and metallic, not the Scots-accented engineer of the Inchcliffe Castle…this one, so far, just extrudes plot into prose without chatting me up or scolding me.)\u00a0\u00a0 In writing and editing these short stories, keeping them short-story length, I’ve become able to recognize the glop that sometimes extrudes along with the plot.\u00a0 Sometimes it’s infodump.\u00a0 Sometimes it’s story-stuff that’s not part of *that* story but another…like the side stories I wrote while writing Paks in the first place–things that happened, that I had to write, but that weren’t main-line-express-train plot for the book.<\/p>\n
Today, I heard from my agent.\u00a0 He’d had one of his people look at Horngard I since he’d led me through revisions several times and gotten–um–over-familiar with it, would be one way of saying it.\u00a0 So today I got the other guy’s opinion.\u00a0 Not familiar at all with the Paksworld books, and thus a really fresh viewpoint.\u00a0 My problems with both the failed Vatta book and Horngard I once Joshua read it, was that I wasn’t yet able to completely understand what he was driving at…I could not see, when re-reading the book to try to work on it…what was wrong and what might fix it.\u00a0 Horngard I understood more, but still not completely.\u00a0\u00a0 Now, looking at James’s comments, it’s clear and I can also see that the part Joshua really wanted me to cut, which I considered necessary, IS necessary but not in its present form, and in its present form, it practically is a nice side story…it sits *beside* the book, on a siding, not the main track.<\/p>\n
So I will start–not tonight because I’m still fighting a week’s sleep deficits–tomorrow, on Horngard I again, for what we all hope will be the final (until it sells or doesn’t and meets a real editor) cleanup.\u00a0 Chapter whatsit will be gone, replaced with a stout coupling between the cars that were before and after it.\u00a0\u00a0 What was carried IN chapter whatsit will be compressed to the plot-relevant-only and put where it will do the most good.\u00a0\u00a0 I have (out of my agent’s hearing, more or less) pledged to myself to remember I’m not writing the epic fantasy equivalent of The Eustace Diamonds<\/em>, in which vast amounts of wordage are expended on details of manner, dress, architecture, internal workings of this or that bar, this or that court, etc., all fascinating\u00a0 to some readers (I’m one of them) , but in terms of my genre of fiction, could easily be handled in a novella.\u00a0 The widow is a dishonest cheat who is illegally hanging on to her late husband’s family jewels, which jewels are part of the estate and thus entailed, she’s lied about everything.\u00a0 In fact, the widow in The Eustace Diamonds <\/em><\/em>has done what Trump has done with the classified documents…in her case using some unwitnessed comments of her late husband the way Trump has used the “Clinton Socks Case” (IOW, the reader is led to believe that the late husband did NOT tell her they were hers to do with as she pleased but lied about her justification, just as Trump has lied about the Presidential Records Act and the “Clinton Socks Case.”\u00a0 At any rate, the train of Horngard needs to stay on the main track and plow ahead through snow and flood and dubious bridges and all that.\u00a0\u00a0 No detours.\u00a0 No stops to admire the view, or the wildflowers, or wander off to discover the weirdities in Guild League regulations compared to the Code of Gird.\u00a0 That’s what side stories and data on the site are for.\u00a0 CHARGE!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I once bought my husband a book entitled “Mistakes and Errors in Surgery” written a long time ago but fascinating in its dissection of typical surgical errors.\u00a0 And I love the title.\u00a0 The sound of it, the rhythm and mouth-feel of the words.\u00a0 Da-DUM, da-DUM-da, da-DUM-da-da.\u00a0\u00a0 (Yes, some writers hear\/feel word sequences like this.) So […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[61,52,53,5],"tags":[62,112,20,51,31,107],"class_list":["post-2997","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-craft","category-editing","category-life-beyond-writing","category-the-writing-life","tag-craft-of-writing","tag-life-beyond-writing","tag-progress-report","tag-revision","tag-the-book-business","tag-the-writing-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2997"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2997"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2997\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2998,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2997\/revisions\/2998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2997"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2997"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2997"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}