Jan 31 2010
“Frankenstein Mistress Novel”‘
OMG, you guys, I wrote a book! Remember that? It’s actually mostly terrible but parts of it are awesome and I know how to fix the terrible bits. I think.
You guys! I wrote a book that has the potential to not be terrible once I work on it a whole lot. How cool is that?
My To Do list today says, amongst other things “Frankenstein Mistress Novel.” My husband looked at it and asked what the heck that meant.
It means: Take all the random hacked up bits of Mistress Novel that are in all different documents and files and combine them into one latest and greatest draft. In other words, take some random parts and reanimate them into one glorious story.
And let me assure you *lightning crashes* It’s alive!!!!!
So I started this book before NaNoWriMo and then continued it during NaNoWriMo. So the 50K words I wrote during NaNo only counted new material which means it was the rest of Mistress Novel and then some of Mistress Novel II: Why haven’t you gone back to your original novel yet, you freakin’ hussy?* (*=not the real title)
I work on my books in sections, meaning my book is never one single document. I have hundreds of documents all over the place that are often individual chapters or scenes. I also always lose track of chapter numbers so after a while the documents are named after what happens in that scene and I end up with several chapter 10′s or something.
Also, during NaNoWriMo I got a bit off my outline in the middle there and had to literally rewrite chunks of book without going back and looking at the old. So you have things where I wrote myself a note like, “She still opens the door but now…” and then a new segment starts to replace what I originally wrote and then it reads “until he comes in, then you go back to file x until the part with the headlights when….” and another section. It was very confusing but I think I have put everything together in order now. I tried really hard not to read much of it so I don’t get obsessed with editing right now.
So for the first time in the recorded history of me, I actually put this entire book in the same document. I’m hoping this will make it less confusing. We’ll see. The elements I don’t like about it are: #1 if I lose this one document, I lose everything and #2 its so big, it is really really confusing and intimidating to work with.
Oh and remember that tightened version of the first chapter I was talking about? Just did a comparison of it and the original in Microsoft Word to make sure there wasn’t anything in the original I needed or left out plot wise. Despite the fact that the exact same things still happen in that scene, the only words in common in the entire chapter between old and new are the following words: character names, smashed, the, in, of and the last 13 words of the last sentence which stayed exactly the same.
I was very impressed with this. No one can hack up a chapter like me, apparently.
As a bonus, I also did a good ole track changes on the first 6 chapters and got some simple typos today which is more than I ever dreamed I’d get done. (Huge props go to my cousin who helped me do some of my eBay work yesterday, thereby letting me steal a little time off to work on my book!)
Major editing starts soon. Man, do I wish there was a way to pause all my normal work to be able to do the editing all at once!
Anyway, no new words added to the count since it’s been all edits and revisions this week so I cannot show the potato with any kind of update. Hope you managed to stay on track though with whatever you’re working on!
