Sometimes I hate editing. I’ve been working on my epic
sci-fi, which is nowhere near finished, trying to at least finish the first
book. My problem is while adding more detail to the story, I keep thinking
of things I should have shown earlier, or other things that really should be
addressed at an earlier spot, and in one case, wasn’t addressed and should have
been.
Yeah, I have been doing a lot of backtracking.
At one point, last week I told Konnie I had finished my
edits up through chapter fifteen and had started on chapter sixteen, which was
true, at the time. I honestly thought when I said it that I was finally making
headway. Well, that was last week, for the last two days I’ve been realizing there
is a major plot hole in the second scene (the unaddressed issue), and that I
hadn’t dealt with a couple of other matters as entirely as I had originally planned.
This means I have to go back and start from the very
beginning of chapter one to find all the possible places to fix these problems!
I guess I should count myself lucky that there are no errors
with my prologue which is basically a fable or myth about the “creation” of
their solar system. That is in fine shape.
The story itself is great, it's just getting all the details
in, and correct.
But this is why I hate editing. I do this all the time, I think
I’ve got a section done and move on, then, usually right when I’m writing some
other detail, I end up going, “Wait a minute!”
I’ve mentioned before the one step forward, two steps back
kind of event, but at this rate, I’ll never finish the series. I’m lucky if I’ll
finish the first book!
And I have this major issue with writing things out of
order, for the life of me, if I write a scene out of order, I’m pretty much done
with the story, I can’t seem to go back and fill the missing sections. Ergo, I
can’t move to another book until this book is finished, and I mean, done editing.
Not that I can move forward that much, because as of yet,
the twin brother of the hero in book one isn’t talking to me, and I kind of
need his POV for most of the rest of the series because he’s vital to the conclusion.
It’s not like he isn’t mentioned already, he just doesn’t
make his appearance, yet, unless you count pictures and holographs of him, or
the fact that they are identical twins, and the hero has gone searching for his
missing twin.
Plus, that doesn’t even get into the fact that last week I was
rereading it and realized that the second scene I had happened well before the
first scene I had, so in essence, the second scene with the plot hole used to
be the first scene.
Okay, yeah that’s something I wrote out of order, but I have
to point out that this epic sci-fi started out as a writing prompt I did for a
workshop some years ago. It was the beginning of the first paragraph that used
to be the first scene. When I submitted that prompt, everyone in the group really
liked it and wanted more.
This was right before Nano, so instead of expanding right away,
I wrote down some plot points, made a list of characters (a semblance of an
outline, if you will), and waited for November first. When Nano started, I
fleshed out what had been the first scene, then wrote what had been the second
scene to finally bring in the hero of this part of the story.
That has to be the first time ever I’ve written anything out
of sequence and still managed to keep going. I promise it usually doesn’t work
like that for me, I can show you tons of partial stories with one scene written
out of sequence and, even after all this time, I have been unable to fill in
the blank. I have tried a time or two, but no go. I do have one where I managed
to fill in a little, but not all.
And this is why I hate editing. It’s so annoying to think I’ve
finished something and then to have it dawn on me that I haven’t.
Konnie certainly knows how I feel, she’s been editing too. On
her epic sci-fi even. But I got her back on that when I informed her, I couldn’t
find the fourth book of that series among our shared files. What I did find was
a repeat of book three under the file name of book four.
Isn’t editing fun?
Happy writing everyone!
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