Pebble Revision Round 1: Complete!
I managed to cut Pebble down from 127,000 words to 117,00 without too much pain. I simply cut out the whole Kate/Brian subplot, which went nowhere anyway. I also chopped up the chapters, so that now instead of 22 long chapters, there are 79 short ones. That alone should make the book more exciting and engaging to read. Now that the chainsaw work is done, it's time to go to Round 2, where the work will be a little more difficult, and hence might take me longer. I'll be taking
Revising Pebble
For the first time in quite a while, I went back to reread some of A Pebble Tossed yesterday. You'll never guess what I learned. I learned that I've gotten better since I wrote it! This is both heartening and discouraging. Heartening, because it means that all the hard work I've been putting in to improve my craft is paying off. Discouraging, because it means I have a lot of work to do to get Pebble up to snuff. I remember when I published Pebble, I thought it was the absolut
The Pros and Cons of Writing in First Person
Progress on my second novel has reached a temporary roadblock. I said temporary! A few things are going on. First, I have another job, and this week I work 10:00-6:30, which gets me home around 8:00. I don't do much but sleep and work during this shift. Second, I'm at a point in the novel where the outline I've been working from is hazy, because at the time I wrote the outline, I wasn't sure how things were going to pan out. Now I know how they panned out, but I still have t
