The Pants are Back: A Revision Post
Monday afternoon I finally finished the latest round of revisions on StT.
This time the pants fit, thanks to a great critique partner at the March Novel Writing Retreat. Laurie Miller made a suggestion that allowed me to cut the extra-large pants down to size--StT is finally under 300 pages. What I have now looks a lot like Katherine Hepburn:
It's not completely the look I'm going for, which is a bit more now, but it's close.
Along the way I discovered something. One of the reasons to write something-anything in the first draft is the keepers you'll drop while you're getting it all down. One scene in particular had an exchange that served multiple purposes, but the scene itself was too long and, I discovered, ultimately unnecessary. So I axed it, but the exchange worked into another scene, replacing dialogue that didn't advance the story. Another kind of keeper was a scene that Laurie thought was unnecessary. I looked at it long and hard--one of the reasons huge chunks of writing time are sometimes necessary--until I figured out that yes, the scene was needed, but that the problem was with what the main character was saying: she was acting out of character. So I sat some more, literally waiting patiently for the words to form. And they did.
Am I done yet?
Almost. My antagonist has been giving me a bit of grief, coming across as too sterotypical. She was tough for me to figure out because she's a conventional girl and I haven't known enough conventional girls to know how they think. I couldn't quite do a Neil Gaiman and make her the hero of her own life. But the critiques I've had since March, and one lovely conversation at the VCFA gathering at the New England SCBWI conference and I've figured out who she is, or at least, what she wants, beyond "a conventional life."
In that respect, the universe seems to keep giving me what I need for this novel, which made me all the happier to discover this video of Terry Pratchett, who apparently had a gift-from-the-universe experience with Nation: http://youtu.be/wqxc4H6UX5U?t=35s (No embedding is possible, apparently).
StT needs another round of revisions, but this one will be about the antagonist--and a bit about the protagonist's cat, who needs to be in and out like your basic cat, which she is.
The goal is to finish before June 22, StT's birthday.
When I make it, something involving cake and candles might just have to happen.
And then, I do believe, it will be time to send this to people who have said they want to see it.