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new article up online
Just in time for the Decemberween season, Reflection's Edge asked me for some ramblings on the topic of fiction and research. I obliged, and Verisimilitude and the Competent Con: Research for Fiction is now live on their site for your reading enjoyment.
In other news, I continue to plow through revisions to the virginity book. It's been occupying a huge amount of time, primarily because I've been tasked with shortening the book as much as possible. No small task, given that the ms. I handed in was 1069 pages long. I keep track of the starting and ending wordcount and page count for the chapters as I go, so that I have some idea of how much I've managed to shorten things (it helps me gauge how much shorter I'm making it, since I'm looking at it on a screen and not as a pile of pieces of paper that gets smaller as I throw things out). When I sent off the revised first half of the book last week, I totaled my revisions statistics for that half of the book and discovered that in revising I managed to cut 21,338 words out of it, a fairly respectable sum. 313 pages to 242.
Since then, I've revised two chapters of the second half and yanked about 9500 words out of those, and the work of shortening it -- while not leaving out anything important, and making sure that everything I leave in the book still works the way it should, which is the time-consuming part -- continues apace. It's very hard, not so much because I'm cutting my own writing (every writer needs to be able to do that) but because I already feel like there is so much that I have left out of this book that I would've liked to have included, and every time I shorten it the heaps of info on the cutting-room floor just get deeper.
And on that note, I was deeply amused to note the following bit in my December monthly horoscope forecast on Susan Miller's AstrologyZone site, in regard to an opposition between Saturn and Neptune in the current Piscean chart:
A writing project that is artistic / literary, journalistic, or commercial (in research, sales, marketing, public relations) seems to be taking up an inordinate amount of your time. You seem to have fallen behind again over the past two months and are frantically working to catch up. Mars in your solar third house of communication has been retrograde since October 1, so you may have had to revise part of the document in October or November. Doing so probably seemed harder than it would have been if you had started from scratch!
No matter - that difficult phase will be over by December 10 and you can make much better progress from that point on. Your income seems to be tied to this endeavor, so keep pressing forward and don't lose morale, dear Pisces.
She couldn't be more right, including that I should be done with the revisions by December 10 if I continue at my current pace. Score one for the astrologers, eh? Let's just hope that she's right about the rest of the (rather sunny!) forecast as well.
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hanneblank) wrote,
