Clarion Write-a-Thon: Good-bye Week One, Hello Week Two
[dc]A[/dc]s of today, the first week of the Clarion Write-a-Thon is in the history books.
So far, I am on task and have met my daily goal of working on editing my novel for an hour a day, every day (Okay, except last Sunday).
Photo by me.
In terms of the story, I am in the middle of the ninth chapter, out of thirty. I decided to make a few major changes, including to one of the main characters.
All of these changes needed to happen, but mostly I really needed to beef up some my characters a bit. My attitude is, ‘if something doesn’t work, change it and see where it leads.’
This happened between drafts of The Magic of Eyri. I made a major change to the character of Zeroth. In the early drafts, he was a straight-up good guy. But, in a later draft, I decided to make him more shadowy and ambiguous. He went from being a Robin Hood type of character to a bounty hunter. The change in Zeroth’s character opened up many other story options, and made him more of an interesting character.
So I figured, why not do the same with this novel? Change something, and see what happens.
The later chapters are going to require the most work, and the most rewriting. But, that is okay.
It feels good to be working on a book every day again. Most of my edits throughout the week have been cleaning up redundancies and making sentences shorter. I have clear cut a few paragraphs here and there, just to speed things up. But, then I add new text, so my overall word count hasn’t really changed all that much–it ebbs and flows, yet hovers around 77 thousand words and change.
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Daniel J. Hogan should change his wardrobe and see what happens. Follow him on Twitter, @danieljhogan.
