So, remember that thing I was working on a few months ago? The android story I blogged for the A-Z challenge during April?
Well, big news, I have officially started the revision process. My initial hope was to shuffle things around a bit, finish out story lines that weren’t quite complete, and maybe get this thing knocked out by the end of July.
Having now read through the whole thing for the first time in more than 2 months, I’m pretty certain that it’s going to need more work than that.
It’s barely a working draft at this point, so my initial goal is to get it shaped up so it at least tells a complete story, hopefully by the end of this month. Then I’ll go back and work an in-depth revision process to make it into a good story that makes sense. Since this will be my first full revision of anything longer than a couple thousand words, I have no idea at all how long it will take me to complete.
My current plan is to try to post updates about once a week specifically on where I am in the revision process. Just in case there are those of you who are interested in such things.
If you haven’t read the story posts, or want to refresh your memory, here’s the first scene. You can navigate to later scenes from there.
What I’ve Done So Far
I have re-read my entire manuscript without making any notes. Then I organized the whole thing into the 4 major story arcs.
- The science fair (4 scenes)
- David and Meltec (11 scenes)
- The political problem (9 scenes)
- Before the dying (2 scenes)
The biggest arc right now belongs to the David and Meltec arc which consists of all the flashbacks to their life leading up to the science fair. That’s a bit of a problem since I really see the science fair itself as the framework story line. I will either need to flesh it out some, or change the overall structure of the story since I currently only have 4 scenes related to the science fair itself. The science fair was the shiny thing that made me want to chase down this story in the first place, so I really hope I can figure out a way to make it really work as the main story line. One way or another, though, the David and Meltec/Science Fair storyline still needs a proper ending.
The political arc has flashback scenes from roughly 20 years prior to “now” and moves forward into scenes that are probably a few weeks after the science fair. The “before the dying” scenes are essentially flashbacks from the political arc.
So first things first, I will be working to figure out the basic structure I need and what scenes I might be missing. I don’t know if I’ll write those scenes completely, or just do basic outlines that I can carry into my full revision so I only have to write what I really know I’m going to need.
Lots to think about here. I’ll keep you posted on how it’s going.
The Other News
Later this month, July 27th to be exact (though that’s UCE, so I’ll actually be live around 6:00PM on the 26th), I’ll again be participating in the StoryTime Blog Hop. This is a quarterly event in which a bunch of speculative fiction authors each post a flash fiction story on their blogs, along with links to all the other stories. It’s usually a lot of fun and I’m looking forward to it. Of course, that means I will need to write at least 1 flash fiction story this month in addition to working on the revision, but I think I can handle it.
I’ll be sure to post a reminder when we get closer to the date of the hop!
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