dichotomy

[swan_tower]

Still copy-editing.

It's been two months or so since I looked at the book. Some bits, I find myself seeing with fresh eyes. Oh. Huh. Those two paragraphs really don't need to be there. Or, that dialogue echoes a nursery rhyme you really don't want in your readers' heads. Fix it.

Others? Are familiar beasts I've been battling with since the first time I committed them to the screen. And so I wrestle with them yet again, trying to find that one word that still eludes me -- the right word -- or how to make that paragraph flow the way it needs to.

Mostly I'm fighting with Tiresias. God damn. How many times have I chipped away at this stupid scene, trying to make the punch land right?

Note to self: don't put a crazed seer in a story EVER AGAIN. They are uncooperative bastards.

Comments

[mirror-dimly.livejournal.com]

In one line you managed to encapsulate so much of my experience of competing in the National Novel Writing Month writing these last few years. First one character shows up, they draw in a few friends and enemies and I (as 'author') am left playing catch-up often with that sinking feeling of "Oh now, what did you do _this_ time?" Why is it that the most interesting characters are the _hardest_ to get to cooperate and go exactly where you want them to?

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Because they are the ones behaving the most like real people?