Alrighty.
I’ve [obviously]
been slack in updating the blog, but I've made great progress fine-tuning cherubs & lavender.
Last December I thought it was just about ready for copy-editing. But because I'd been immersed in it for so long, I gave myself a little distance so I could look at it objectively one final time. (Copy-editing is expensive. It's vital I have everything just how I want it. If I pay to have it copy-edited and then I rewrite chunks, I'm wasting money.) Unfortunately when I came back and
reread, it felt off.
I wanted to think it was just me. I'm so used to the story, of course I'd think it's boring. It's not boring! It can't be boring! Because shoot, if the book
needed another overhaul, that meant I was way off course. This was a ~45K word manuscript that had already devoured
weeks of my life. The first rough-draft
was complete mid-late 2013. Other writers could have had a polished product
ready for readers’ eyes in a fraction of the time it’d taken me to get here.
But it wasn’t just me. I paid someone to beta-read
my work, and she picked up on the exact same issues I was concerned about. And found
a few problems to which I was oblivious.
So I went back to rewriting and editing.
In addition to general polishing and plot-tweaking, here
are the primary things I fixed:
Characters. When
I wrote cherubs I wanted a short horror
story that would hit you from the start and never let up. I threw a group of neighborhood kids at
the reader with minimal character development and expected the reader to be happy to immediately accompany them into a haunted
house.
I should have known better.
I provided no time to connect to the protagonists, which shortchanged any potential scare in my novel. Most horror comes in fearing for the characters, but to fear for the characters you
have to care about them. If you’re not invested, you’re detached. If you’re
detached, it’s just going to be words on a page; just actors and special
effects and noise on a screen.
Repetitive descriptions.
I have a tendency to over-describe things. In the process of writing I see this
repetition as stylistic. A descriptive technique. Part of my art arsenal. Something
the reader will enjoy. Like giving the reader photographs of a statue taken
from multiple angles so the reader can appreciate the statue in all its glory.
Now imagine what I did in those last five sentences
happening every other paragraph. Me elaborating on details needlessly. Using multiple
analogies to describe a simple concept. My pages were filled with these types of redundancies. They clogged the story’s arteries.
Chapters. The initial
design of cherubs was chapter-free. No
chapters. No escape. The readers would feel they were being consumed by the
story just like the children were being swallowed by the house.
I had to abandon this idea. My story didn’t feel
relentless. It felt tedious. cherubs benefits
from allowing time to breathe between scenes. There’s something pleasing about reaching the
end of a chapter and looking forward to or dreading what waits in the next
section.
On top of that, the story was just begging to be broken
up. It features a good bit of time-jumps into the past. Having one continuous take
made these awkward. And even in the “straightforward” parts, I’d find drab
transitional sentences connecting two parts that simply needed a chapter break.
--
So where am I?
Close.
I’ll give cherubs to my friends and
family to read. I’ll wait to see if anything bothers them or comes across as glaringly bad. I’ll
comb over it one final time (knock on wood). And then I’ll send it off for copy-editing and it’s
game on.
