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Friday, 26 May 2006
I be ever so 'umble...
Please click to view Poison Pixie's fantastic new Saul Bass trailer for DANNY VOLUME II (Takes approx 4 minutes to download)
Taking time out because I have something weighing on my mind.
One of my critics was right.*
Because Harry Greaves, in Volume II, uses the terms Red and Sunshine as names I've had to use more discretion with commas before names. It's highlighted how often it can be confusing, albeit it's because words like sunshine and red have other meanings that Danny, John etc can't possibly have. Nevertheless, I've had to adopt it more often in this book. I have to say, me being me, that I've continued to miss out a lot of them too. But who knows, I may reform and go all the way and surprise myself (cough).
But it's been bothering me, especially as I wrote an article on the subject. It's beginning to make me feel like a hypocrite, at worst, and an apologist, at best, so I felt some public reparation was in order.
That said, of course, anyone who reads a thousand page masterwork like DANNY and the first thing they do is moan about the lack of commas is still a pedantic asshole in my book – but that kind of takes the edge off my apology, does it not?
So, let's just go with, my critic was right, at least in essence, and I am thankful for having it pointed out to me - although she really does need to get her priorities straight.
No, there are still way too many qualifiers in that paragraph. It just sounds grudging, doesn't it? Let's try that again.
My critic had a point, that has become more pertinent while editing this volume, and I am grateful that her petty carping highlighted something I think I might otherwise have missed. And she deserves some gratitude for that. So here it is. Thank you.
That's better.
Okay, that's done I can go back to the editing with a clear conscience. I'm at page 756 now.
This is, of course, only the first edit, known to myself as Baring the Bones, or The Excavation. This is when you pull the bones of the story out of all the verbiage, and try and find out what each scene is about. At the end of this first dig you have a short fallow phase where you let the sediment settle to the bottom of the pool, and hopefully see the whole skeleton of the book, often accompanied with some aha moments – "So that's what that was all about!"
Then we have the second, and worst, edit. This is when you have to fix all the scenes that are wrong. Either wrong because they're pointless, or the point is so submerged no-one could see it. Sometimes you work on one scene for four days and end up having to dump it. It's actually better if you can see straight away if you don’t need it. The second edit is much slower and more time-consuming.
Once it's done you do the third edit. This is the same as the second edit, fixing those good old intuitive just-doesn't-feel-right scenes. However, this is both easier and harder. Easier because now you can read straight through longish stretches of the book, admiring what a great writer you are and, for the first time, enjoying your own prose. However, every once and a while there are the remaining scenes left over from the second edit, that you just couldn't get right. These have to be worked again (and again). And by now they are getting to be like work-hardened metal. Brittle, intractable and forced. But you get them as good as you can and read it yet again, in edit three, by now beginning to detest some of your characters habits and finding yourself imitating them out loud, with sneering. This is the crazy phase (like any of it is sane), when you talk back to them and pick holes in their arguments and get aggressive and nit-picking. I suppose you become every hostile, critical reader, and I suppose it's a kind of failsafe to make sure the book holds water. Either that or it's just stir-crazy boredom.
And then it's back to the start for edit three. This is getting ready for the final brush up. You're watching for typos now, unsympathetic punctuation – do you need more? Less? Was Terminal Beach wrong after all (shit), and they all have to come out again? You put 'em in, you take 'em out. It gets stupid and brain-frying. But you get through, finding some of the cursed scenes now read beautifully (paradoxically some of the best scenes invariably come form the worst original material – now, you could ponder on why that is for a long time).
However some of them don't. Some of them still aren't right. So you tweak some more, occasionally give up and rip the fucker out, other times rewrite entirely and leave them to see how they brew.
And then it's the fourth and last edit. Primarily proof reading now, but, let's face it, still editing up to the last minute, occasionally, and reluctantly, admitting that one or two of the scenes will have to go 'as is' or you will die with the book unpublished.
Of course, right up till the day it goes to the printer you keep picking and tweaking. I remember sitting the day before production of Volume I literally feeding fifty or sixty 'corrections' into the Quark file original.
It never stops.
So, that's what I have to look forward to. And, of course, I have an additional problem with this Volume. Because II and III were all one book originally it has an arbitrary break in the 'middle' where Danny goes away. This is the present Volume II and is currently 938 pages long (the shortest of all the books). Volume III, however, is 1519 pages long. Lopsided, as you can see. So I will have to continue reading into III to see if any of it could/should be moved into II.
If, as I suspect, it will not be artistically pleasing to have any of it in Volume II it will mean Volume III will have to be sold as a two part book. So it will be Danny Volume III parts I and II. Fun, huh?
Right, back to the grindstone.
Wish me well.
* For those of you who don't know, my detractor criticised DANNY for occasionally not bothering to use commas before qualifying names to achieve certain effects of speech – i.e. I use, for example, "Sit down John", instead of the more grammatically correct, "Sit down, John." (See my article How Long is This, or This; or This? in archives)
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There is also an independent Live Journal DANNY Discussion Board run by fans, C Stone's DANNY. As this is new there isn't much on it yet. However, if you would like to talk about the book Jill & Jodie are experts, so please go along and say hello. I'm sure they'd love to hear from you.
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Comments
You're welcome.
I'm without a doubt a pedantic bitch, by the way - which means that about four pages into V. I I was hating the comma thang, because in many cases the missing commas change the meaning of the sentence, as we've been through already.
Now that is said, I got used to it after a while.
Thanks for noticing my spectacularly hopeless abbreviation, which has made me consider forking out 15 USD for an LJ name change token. Disease, anyone?
Good luck with the editing process. I promise I'll chew you out for missing commas in V. II too.
Posted by: Terminal Beach | Saturday, 27 May 2006
"I promise I'll chew you out for missing commas in V. II too."
And I promise to ignore you.
As to the name change - just don't fork out for Vale of Darkness.
How about Fabulous Uterus?
Posted by: chancery stone | Saturday, 27 May 2006