Valor of the Healer

Edit-a-thon, Day 2

I think last night’s estimate was about right: turns out I killed 260 words out of Chapter 21 tonight. The page count is down to 26, but the 26th page is really only half a page, and with judicious pruning I might be able to kill the rest of that page too. We’ll see tomorrow night.

In addition to just general verbiage reduction, I found at least a couple more places where I could eliminate sentences that were not absolutely critical to the action. It’ll be amusing to me at some point to compare my style in the first draft of this thing with my style in the fourth.

Edited tonight: -260
Chapter 21 revised total: 6,224
Lament of the Dove revised total (fourth draft): 121,461

Valor of the Healer

Lament of the Dove edit watch: Day 1!

About 200 words tonight killed in Chapter 21. Page count of that chapter went down another page from 28 to 27. Biggest edit: deleted an entire paragraph in which I rather fancied the imagery but in which I had to make myself realize that actually, it didn’t really need to be there.

There’s another six pages or so that I haven’t scanned through yet in this chapter, and I don’t know yet what this means in terms of how many more words I’ll be able to kill from it. Another couple of hundred, if I’m lucky; a net loss of 600 or so on the chapter feels kind of light to get me to the goal, though.

We’ll see what happens tomorrow.

Edited tonight: -204
Chapter 21 revised total: 6,484
Lament of the Dove revised total (fourth draft): 121,721

Short Pieces

Meanwhile, this ought to be fun

My editor has asked me if I would be interested in submitting a piece for a new Drollerie Press anthology set during the years of the Civil War. I’ve told her yes, and am playing with an idea set in the same universe as Faerie Blood, with a working summary that goes something like this:

A young slave woman who’s gifted with healing magic and who’s on the run on the Underground Railroad comes across a Warder who’s been driven off his territory by the war (possibly due to being forcibly conscripted into either army, but more due to battle on his Warded ground tainting his connection to the land and driving him around the bend); she’s trying to escape slavery, he’s fleeing from the army as well as his own madness. They are driven out onto Roanoke Island, which has been haunted ever since the disappearance of the colony there nearly three hundred years ago–by the ghost of its last Warder, who has been lingering there ever since the colony was wiped out. My hero and heroine have to join forces to not only cleanse the island, but also to defend it against a resurgence of whatever nasty supernatural thing wiped out the colony–and my heroine has to choose between continuing her flight north, and accepting her own magic and helping the Warder soldier establish a new bond to the island so that both he and the ghost can find some peace.

I’m going to look forward to writing this out.

Valor of the Healer

In an attempt to kick myself into gear…

… I emailed agent Diana Fox, who y’all may remember I last approached this past fall regarding Lament, to ask her whether it’s still okay for me to submit the revised version of the manuscript to her for consideration. She says yes.

This means I am now setting myself the goal to not only finish the edit pass on the fourth draft but also get it beta-read before , , and I head to Disneyland on the 9th. I have four more chapters and an epilogue to finish editing, and thankfully at this point, I think I’ve passed all the bits that need major surgery. So it should be down to a question of word count reduction.

Y’all consider this an early warning then that I’m going to need a beta reader or three to sanity-check this thing for me before I fire it off at Ms. Fox. The level of effort required here would simply be to read over the manuscript and make sure it hangs together coherently–since I’ll have killed 20,000 words out of it, and in some places significantly tweaked events, I’ll need to make sure all of these changes have made it an overall leaner and meaner story. Significant tweaking in particular has been done with Faanshi’s portrayal, trying to strengthen her as a character, and I need to make sure that works too.

General proofreading will also be welcome but not required.

So if anybody thinks they may have free cycles in the week or so before July 9th and will have time to chug through about 117K worth of novel, let me know!

Book Log

Book Log #42: Wanderlust, by Ann Aguirre

The second Sirantha Jax book by Ann Aguirre didn’t strike me with quite as much awesome as the first one–but that’s not to say that I didn’t like the book, because I did. Wanderlust picks up in the aftermath of Grimspace, with Jax and her beloved March being interrogated while the Confederacy scrambles to reorient after the shock wave of what happened in the first book. Now out of a formal job, Jax is offered the highly unlikely position of Ambassador to Ithiss-Tor, only to discover that there are powerful parties who will stop at nothing to keep her from pulling it off.

Here’s the thing though: once Jax actually accepts this job, much of the rest of the book isn’t about it at all. Rather, it’s about getting her to it, and revisiting the world that much of Book 1’s events took place on so that March a plot-relevant excuse to actually bail on Jax for a while. Which is all very action-packed and exciting to be sure, but that whole part of the plot worked a little too hard to convince me that March had torn apart his own soul because of the Horrors of War and Oh Noez! He’s Going to Have to Do It Again! Also, Oh Noez! There’s a new gorgeous guy who has Romantic Rival for March Written All Over Him! And, Oh Noez! March is going off to war because he thinks Jax doesn’t actually need him!

So all in all there was a little bit too much Oh Noez! for me, this time around. But it wasn’t badly written and I’m still absolutely interested in seeing how Jax manages to pull off working her way into actually knowing what she’s doing with this ambassador gig, which one presumes will start happening in earnest in Book 3. For this one, three stars.

Book Log

PSA: Tasty inexpensive Kat Richardson hardback

As a general public service announcement, is sharing with her readers that the hardback edition of Underground, the third Greywalker novel, is now being sold by Barnes and Noble at super-cheap prices–about half the price of the forthcoming paperback edition.

So if you’re thusly inclined and can’t afford the paperback, you might consider checking that out!

I can say that I’m actually reading this book right now as we speak, and am enjoying it quite a bit. A lot of tasty Seattle-history goodness in it, particularly if you’ve taken the Underground tour, which I have.

Valor of the Healer

And now, Chapter 21

Started digging into Chapter 21 tonight as planned. The results of tonight’s efforts: 200-some-odd eliminated words, which so far makes up for the extra words added to Chapter 20. And I think I killed about a page and a half all told; the file started at 29 pages, and now I’m down to 28, and page 28 is only about half full. I hit page 13 before I decided it was bedtime.

This’ll do. We’ll see if I can kill a couple more hundred words in this chapter before I hit the end.

Edited tonight: -203
Chapter 21 revised total: 6,688
Lament of the Dove revised total (fourth draft): 121,925