I've been waiting to read Sapphique by Catherine Fisher since I first heard that it was going to be published in the US. It took me almost exactly forty-eight hours to read the book. When that happens, I always think about how long it takes an author to write the book that I just sped through in less than a week. For me, writing a novel takes a good three months, and that's without editing, so when I read a book in under five days, I almost feel like I'm wasting the book. Like I shouldn't be allowed to read the book that fast when it took the author so much effort to write. Having written numerous novels myself, I now have more respect for books when I read. I can appreciate the amount of work they spent editing the pages I'm reading; I even pay more attention to the way a book is written, but that doesn't stop me from reading it in two days.
And speaking of writing, here's my transition into talking about my current novel. Yay for abrupt transitions, a lack of an actual transitional sentence, and starting a sentence/paragraph with a coordinating conjunction! But hey, my comp 100 professor said you can break the rules so long as you know that you're breaking them. Er, yeah. My novel.
It's actually the first novel that I ever finished (way back in 2004) that I'm rewriting. I finished my seventh story and decided it was time for some editing. This particular novel, The Legend of Zirannia, has been rewritten numerous times (I think I'm working on the fourth completely rewritten draft), the biggest rewrite being in 2008, so I figured, it's 2011 now, why not try again?
My single-sentence book summary:
When reincarnation brings a young ruler back to his kingdom, his return is not at all how anyone expected, least of all the king himself.
I thought up the idea for this story when I was twelve/thirteen, though the actual storyline and characters I'm working with now weren't created until 2007, perhaps? It's an interesting change, to know exactly what is happening in a story I'm writing, because usually I do hardly any planning. But it's also nice to finally fix this story up and cut all the pointless subplots and rewrite all the horrible sentences as well as add some characterization--which was very much lacking.
I've rewritten 20,000 words so far since January 1st (on New Year's Eve I decided I was going to rewrite The Legend of Zirannia--the next day, I started), cutting out about 15,000 of eck. With those discarded words went numerous characters. Two POV characters have been scrapped, another semi-main character has dwindled to half the character that it used to be, but I don't mind so much. Now I realize that those characters were just fill-ins. I thought my story needed more people in it (besides the three main characters, two "bad guys," and the few other smaller characters that are actually important to the plot), so it's actually a relief to cut them. It's a fun experience, rewriting my first novel and watching how the characters change and seeing how the plot kinks unwind. This story is finally narrowing its focus and its plot is becoming clearer. Finally. After about seven years.
(As I write this post, I keep thinking I should write something about dancing next, being as my "about me" says I'm firstly a dancer. I guess it's easier to write about writing than write about dancing. :p Maybe my next post will be about dance, seeing as dance has started back up and I've got one last audition on February 5th.)
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