28 August 2005: Almost Done...

Gazing into the Abyss: Michael Rawdon's Journal

Almost Done...

Last night I finished my second revision of the novelette I've had in the works for, well, a while now.

Revising a story seems a lot harder than writing the first draft. Not that the first draft felt easy. I figure this is because of two reasons:

I'm not experienced at writing, so my first draft is pretty rough, by any writer's standards. So there's more that needs revising.
I'm not experienced at revising, so it just takes me a while.

Fixing spelling and some of my wackier sentence structures is pretty easy. What's hard is rewriting scenes, figuring out which sentences need to be cut (often because they don't make sense in their present context and need to go elsewhere, or because they undercut the story in some way and just need to be removed). The story has several fairly abstract moments in it, characters speaking relative nonsense but not utter nonsense (you know, like Edward Gorey used to do). I hacked out some bits of this on my first pass, but in most cases I decided I wanted to take it in a different direction. It's harder to come up with nonsense when you're thinking about it.

I'm pretty happy with the result at this point. There are still things that can be improved, but at this point I'm not going to tear apart the structure of the story to send it in a different direction. I need to finish it off and circulate it.

So I'm going to put it aside for a couple of weeks and work on some other stories (plus I have a vacation coming up), and then give it a final read-through and do some final edits of anything I find. And then pronounce it done.

At last.

Otherwise, it was basically a weekend of plugging away at stuff. We went for a bike ride with Mark and Yvette today, which was fun. It was a really hot weekend, but the day was just about perfect for bike riding, especially out by the bay. We did some shopping and dropped off clothes at Goodwill to round out the day.

I cooked a corned beef brisket for dinner, and grilled corn-on-the-cob to go with it. It's the traditional dinner of places that use the word "corn" a lot. But actually the milder flavor of the corn went well with the corned beef. I used my grandfather's recipe for preparing corned beef, which amounts to steaming it in the oven rather than boiling it, which I like because it preserves the brisket's sharp flavor. Mmm. I made ice cream to finish everything off. It came together pretty well. Debbi appreciated it partly because she's coming down with a cold and appreciated being cooked for.