Some quick thoughts on revising this bawdy scifi novel
Point one relates to the heading of this blog entry. I have had conversations with a number of science fiction fans over the years about the shortening of the genre's name. Many of them hate scifi or sci fi or sci-fi or however you want to space it. Asimov didn't like it - I seem to remember reading that in his autobiography.
Well, personally I don't care. And it's listed as sci-fi in too many places now to really stress over it. It's just a name - as long as they are no denigrating it then all is good as far as I am concerned.
Okay - onto the blog itself. As anyone who has seen any of my tweets over the past few weeks or reads this blog in detail I wrote a bawdy scifi novel I called No Man's Land. I even wrote it as my attempt at NaNoWriMo which was probably a mistake. Again - detail on that has happened already.
Well I did the fairly quick skim through to correct the obvious issues a little while ago - mainly fixing grammar and spelling and making sure no character changed name. When I did this I noticed the longer the book went on the more inventive I was getting with the euphemisms and the more settled the euphemisms became.
This gave me the problem that I had to look to thoroughly revise the first few chapters to make them fit in. Well with chapter six I think I have found out when the voice became right. It took far less time to revise that chapter than earlier ones.
Here's hoping that the previous schedule of one chapter a day can be thrown away as history - tonight I have typed up the handwritten notes (admittedly scrawled down on earlier days) and have a third draft of chapters 5 & 6 and it's only just turned 8pm. Some of that was helped as I worked from home today so I could do some work on the revision during my lunch break; not an option I have on most days in the office (any day to be fair - I am pretty conscientious when I'm in the office).
So I am going to head off for a while - leave the keyboard alone and go back to paper and the red pen and make notes on the next chapter or two. Hopefully the novel will be in a decent enough state to submit it to a couple of agencies by the end of next week.
More later
Well, personally I don't care. And it's listed as sci-fi in too many places now to really stress over it. It's just a name - as long as they are no denigrating it then all is good as far as I am concerned.
Okay - onto the blog itself. As anyone who has seen any of my tweets over the past few weeks or reads this blog in detail I wrote a bawdy scifi novel I called No Man's Land. I even wrote it as my attempt at NaNoWriMo which was probably a mistake. Again - detail on that has happened already.
Well I did the fairly quick skim through to correct the obvious issues a little while ago - mainly fixing grammar and spelling and making sure no character changed name. When I did this I noticed the longer the book went on the more inventive I was getting with the euphemisms and the more settled the euphemisms became.
This gave me the problem that I had to look to thoroughly revise the first few chapters to make them fit in. Well with chapter six I think I have found out when the voice became right. It took far less time to revise that chapter than earlier ones.
Here's hoping that the previous schedule of one chapter a day can be thrown away as history - tonight I have typed up the handwritten notes (admittedly scrawled down on earlier days) and have a third draft of chapters 5 & 6 and it's only just turned 8pm. Some of that was helped as I worked from home today so I could do some work on the revision during my lunch break; not an option I have on most days in the office (any day to be fair - I am pretty conscientious when I'm in the office).
So I am going to head off for a while - leave the keyboard alone and go back to paper and the red pen and make notes on the next chapter or two. Hopefully the novel will be in a decent enough state to submit it to a couple of agencies by the end of next week.
More later
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