Step One + Snippet

Saturday, April 2, I finished the structural parts of the revisions. Now I’m going over the other comments. Stuff has been taken out. Stuff taken out was partly at the request of Editor and partly my initiative, as the changes in structure up to that point made the stuff taken out less organic to the whole. Stuff has been put in. Stuff put in was mostly at the request of Editor.

Now I’m working on all the smaller stuff needing smoothing and polishing. If you knock out an 8 foot wide section of a room’s wall to expand it into another room with only a partial divider, that’s structural. But if you leave the edges of the knock-out unfinished, it’s raw and ugly. If the piece you knocked now has half the back of the refrigerator sticking into it…also raw and ugly. Not good at all.

So I’m looking for rough spots, for mismatched patches, for a place where the structural change caused another problem I hadn’t anticipated (very common when making big structural changes late in a book), where it needs a paint job, where it needs a new door casing, or the door to open the opposite way, etc. My husband is also reading it (fresh eyes) to help me out. (Though from the clink of spoon on bowl from that end of the house, I suspect he’s eating ice cream at the moment.)

And I’d really like to shrink it another 5000 words, get it back down to the 125,000 range, though so far all the words are sticking to the story as if Super-Glued ™ to it. I find myself picking them off one or two at a time.

Though it’s post-Easter, here’s a bit of an Easter Egg: something that was taken out and isn’t there anymore. I’m calling it a snippet, even though it’s no longer part of the text, because it was once. We’re on a planet. Greyhaus is an officer in that planet’s military, commanding a seasonal research base. Neither Greyhaus nor Golassen now appears onstage in the book, but it’s interesting that they misjudge each other. Neither one knows as much as would be useful about the other’s background and thus who is pulling whose strings in which direction.

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“We’re going to need two transports, if not three.” Colonel Bernard Rafael Greyhaus stared down Mervyn Golassen. Golassen was used to giving orders and having people jump, but to Greyhaus he was a typical civilian bureaucrat, flabby and overpaid.

“That’s ridiculous. Civilian craft that size can carry–” Golassen blinked, obviously accessing his implant. “–over three hundred.”

“Three hundred fourteen civilians including flight and cabin crew,” Grayhaus said. “Not anywhere near that many ground troops ready to fight the moment they land. And then there’s the equipment beyond what they carry on them. And the possibility that the targets managed to disable the locks and have access to small arms, which–if properly used against aircraft while landing–can destroy them.”
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