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Teaching Myself to Edit

Real writers are voluminous writers. They have completed novels, abandoned novels, and unwritten novels. Never mind writing more than one story in a lifetime or year, they write more than one a month. Sometimes after tens of pages they give up on a story because it turns out to be going nowhere. No doubt many have forgotten so much of what they’ve written they’d not recognize it if it weren’t on their harddrives.

These authors hack out manuscripts well past midnight night after night. I suspect when they pause for thought it’s not to figure out what to write but which way of the many they want to write it. They continue typing through rough patches and lulls, because, really, what else would you do?

1000 Days is still teaching me the same lesson I needed to learn on day one. It’s still teaching me to write something I enjoy and then to ignore it and move on to the next day. This is a difficult lesson. Every idea I have feels like THE idea—too important to cast off after a day or two of exploration. I do it anyway.

It’s time for me to learn to edit.

My pieces here don’t really have the word count to warrant an edit in the sense that I’ll be taking a first draft to the second draft stage, but I’ll have to make do with what I can. Saturdays I will reach back about 100 days for editing fodder.

Tomorrow I’ll be digging into…

Day 104: Bunbun of the Veleme

Word count: 264
Day 205

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The Definitive Waccho Maquette

Everything about a Waccho appears human expect for their scale and proportions.

Given the same age and maturity a Waccho man extends past his human counterpart by his head and shoulders. While not making him quite as imposing as those arboreal giants of Canituu, the Anori, Wacchos regularly participate socially with humans. Their presense can be quite disconcerting. Waccho women—who are often confused for adolescent males—follow the same pattern of scale and sociability. Most times the women are on par with an adult human man. Some clever traders among their clans use these differences artfully in negotiating deals with our people.

If their height is disconcerting, their proportions are humorous and a bit off putting. From not a great distance, an unmoving Waccho appears human. If there is no other reference—a building or livestock to provide scale—even more so. Then they move.

A local fern-peddler, a man claiming to have hunted wild trens in the Thoon archipelago with the Captain Noag himself (so he should know), described the Waccho gait as an unsuccessful attempt to fall down. A Waccho’s lower limbs—arms and legs—are longer in proportion to their upper limbs than are a human’s.

The differences continue in their faces. A Waccho’s mouth is slender and nearly lipless. While their noses’ parallel our own, the distance between the mouth and the nose exceeds ours. Their eyes favor the edges of their face more than the center and are large and wide. Overall they have a flatter facial structure, that along with the mouth and eyes, reminds one of a startled doe. According to Waccho men their women are quite lovely with more delicate faces, but this author uses their modes of dress to distinguish between the sexes on most occasions.

Word count: 302
Day 204

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Almost Like Writing

The outstanding looking Scrivener software for the Mac stumbled into my Internet surfing yesterday. As a result I began googling ‘scrivener for windows’. Most of the hits were people wishing there was such an app, but a very few proposed candidates. I installed and played with three contenders: yWriter, Liquid Story Binder XE, and Celtix.

I’ve been aware of yWriter by Spacejock Software for a number of years. It hits every time I search for writing software. The most recent addition, version 4, shows maturity and a better thought out design than I recall earlier versions sporting. If I were only needing subtance and practicality, I think this would do the trick, but I’m a little bit of a gloss whore. yWriter, the best of the three, is not chrome-tastic.

Celtix is chrome-tastic. It’s also focused on script writing with the ability to handle plain text—you know, for mere mortals. The link I followed didn’t make it out to be so industry specific, so maybe it’s unfair in this line up. Most of the bits can be coerced into use for novel writing and probably serve just fine. The rest of the bits just hang out there screaming let’s write a movie. For me that is distraction enough to avoid further use.

Liquid Story Binder XE comes the closest at a glance to Scrivener. Once I installed it and poked around I discovered that it’s not flexible and complex, but a mess. Some dude cobbled this up to his own specific writing needs. If your specific writing needs and his are parallel then great, you’re set. Mine aren’t.

What do I need you ask.

I’m not entirely sure. Since I haven’t written a novel or long piece of fiction I can’t say for certain what I need. What I want though scans out something like this:

  • Foldering to organize the chunks of writing
  • Character sheets
  • Location sheets
  • Prop sheets
  • An intuitive way to inventory characters, locations, and props across the chunks
  • Word count and task duration statistics
  • Integrated submission/rejection tracking
  • Looks cool