Daily Words: How I’m Starting to Edit

The first thing I really did was throw Daukherville aside in disgust for a few weeks. I didn’t get there–not to the point where I thought I was in the fevered hours when I wrapped it all up. I know what I want the book to be, and I know it’s not there yet. I have a lot of work left to do.

The question now is how do I begin?

I’ve started by conceiving a program called WATSON. WATSON displays the sections of my novel, tracks pertinent details and timeline events and character specifics and any other notes or to-dos I might want to assign myself. It also lets me know when my sentence structure or my sentences themselves grow redundant or cliched.

I started building WATSON while I was finishing my book, and now it seems a challenging mountain of tasks to finish writing the program and edit the stupid novel.

So I think what I will do first is to focus on parsing the novel into the program and logging each scene’s characters and basic gist and analyzing each scene for drama. This will end up working out to be a read-through of the book and a chance to note details. As I find them, I’ll enter the information into the program to make sure I’m not making mistakes about my own characters.

I’d like to have the first read-through completed within the week. Assuming the delivery date for the next draft of the novel to be Halloween, I want to have a real solid editing plan ready by next Sunday.

In the meantime, I’ve been reading a lot, which is nice. Read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (not great, but readable), Supervirus (written by my roommate’s coworker), but now I’m finally into something I really love, which is Katherine Dunn’s amazing book, Geek Love. I read the first third this weekend, and it’s brilliant. Even now, it’s calling to me, telling me to forget all this editing crap and get back to the world of the Binewskis.