Lesson 17 is actu­ally apply­ing everything learned to this point to the phys­ical manuscript.

This, is huge.

I had a rough start, mostly because I was once again re-​writing the open­ing scenes, but then the flow kicked in and it’s going much bet­ter now. I am thrilled at how many more things are con­nect­ing together, mak­ing the story bet­ter, stronger than it was.

Ideally, this pro­cess is to include everything we ever made a note on that we still intend to change or add. I’m doing well with this, to a point. One of my great loves in read­ing is a story world that lives and breathes and envel­ops me. Unfortunately, I tend write very lean the first (or 17th) time around, fol­low­ing a plot care­fully, but with only a skel­eton of a story world for my read­ers’ sus­pen­sion of dis­be­lief to trip over. Before con­tinu­ing to the ‘cos­metic sur­gery’ of the final les­sons, I plan to go back to Lesson 7 and make sure my scenes com­mu­nic­ate the set­ting that I need them to, without chok­ing the pace.

I am at the half-​way point now of fin­ish­ing my revi­sion, intend­ing to com­plete it this week. With scenes adjus­ted appro­pri­ately? We’ll see.

Share/​Save

Well, Lesson 16 went pretty quickly, and tomor­row I will begin “The Cut”!

It is an intense few weeks of cut­ting, rework­ing, and adding to my phys­ical manu­script (includ­ing cut-​and-​paste using real scis­sors and glue). The very last thing to do is typ­ing in all the changes. I don’t know how fast this pro­cess will go, but I am look­ing for­ward to the chal­lenge, and com­plet­ing it by my deadline.

All good wishes much appre­ci­ated.

Share/​Save

If you will recall, Lesson 7 was extremely tax­ing but gave me one of the main things I wanted to get out of this course — how to handle set­ting bet­ter. Lesson 15 was the other main thing — play­ing with time lines to find the Right beginning.

Lesson 15 involved play­ing solit­aire with my scene cards, and look­ing at what that brought to the story. Even done ran­domly, amaz­ing things were revealed that made a huge dif­fer­ence when I brought a front scene to the middle, or a middle scene to the front. I’m still a little leery about the com­mit­ment level, see­ing as I’ve re-​written the begin­ning of this thing about 15 times, but my beta-​reader assures me that it’s a strong intro, so I’m going to go with that. You have to start somewhere!

Share/​Save

Completed Lesson 14, “Simple Time”. Finally got the timeline straight in my head. How many days would it take to get from A to B? If the dis­astrous meet­ing star­ted around mid­day and fin­ished at one, why are you walk­ing home by lamp light?

Once again some ‘scary’ edits, things that I knew weren’t quite right but didn’t know how to deal with on my own, are no longer issues because I had tools and sup­port to take care of it. It did take work, but I could both find and fix them. Wow.

Share/​Save

Of course when we start writ­ing, we love the idea. Then revis­ing we see everything that could be bet­ter, or rather, we get the feel­ing they could be bet­ter, but pre-​HTRYN we don’t have the vocab­u­lary to expli­citly define and there­for fix what’s not as good as it could be. And that’s disappointing.

The cumu­lat­ive pro­gress by the end of les­son 12 has left me excited about my story again! There were so many things that nagged and niggled in my mind, even after much effort revis­ing on my own. I fixed a lot things before, but the remain­ing prob­lems I just couldn’t get a grip on. HTRYN has given me everything I wanted from the course now (and there’s still more to go!). What was weak is now strong. Everything that bugged me and left me in tears of frus­tra­tion I know I can fix and am going to fix. I am so thrilled that by the time I actu­ally sub­mit it, I am going to be HAPPY with this manuscript.

I’m so thank­ful for this course!

Share/​Save

I think I was over-​thinking Lesson 11. Let’s hope that’s what it was! At any rate, I am press­ing on to new and unthink­able things to do with/​to my characters.

My vil­lain really needs work, and I’ve added a lot of sig­ni­fic­ance to a minor char­ac­ter so he needs help too. I’m a little wor­ried about poten­tially need­ing to make major adjust­ments to main char­ac­ters, and I’m nervous about what exactly this is gonna take… but if the end res­ult is a Good Book, the work is worth it!

Share/​Save

Another inspir­ing les­son. This week I made my way through a pro­cess that let me make changes I have known need to be made for quite some time now. I haven’t done the re-​write yet, but I have an I hope solid plan for restruc­tur­ing the begin­ning (always tricksy) and the end, includ­ing a sig­ni­fic­ant beefing-​up of the romantic sub­plot, a fresh intens­ity to some import­ant scenes and a dimin­ish­ing of another character’s POV to increase the impact on my protagonist.

I know how I want it to end, I’m just not sure how much I want to stuff in before the end. There are some good scenes I cut long before which will bring clos­ure to other sub­plots, but I’m not sure if I want them or not. The next les­son looks like it will help with this. I also should do some research into just what kind of a word-​count I should be shoot­ing for. I’m not even sure what I have right now…

Share/​Save

So after the extreme butt-​whooping of Lesson 7, after part of a morn­ing of bash­ing my head against a wall I got Lesson 8 done in one day (after read­ing it through a few times the pre­vi­ous day), and then did the same for Lesson 9. That got me two whole les­sons done in just one week! I am now done the “triage” por­tion of the course, and learn­ing the tools needed for “major surgery”.

Lesson 10 is likely to take a week at least again, but for now I appear to be back on sched­ule for fin­ish­ing this puppy by the end of the year.

Once again, Go Me!

Share/​Save