National Novel Editing Month update, week 4

Total time logged so far: 46 hours, 2 minutes.

I’ve almost made it! Less than 4 hours to go in the last 3 weekdays. I can make that easily – even with Hamilton Writers’ meeting and the Script Frenzy kick-off party on my calendar. Hmm…

So here’s the headlines for my editing progress on days 22 through 28:

• More proofreading and checking of ‘Roswell Calling’, up to starting chapter 6.
• Finishing my serious changes notes of ‘The Long way Home.’
• Fixing a dozen or so unresolved problems, (marked in bracket notes) on my 2009 Nanowrimo second draft “Won’t somebody think of the children.”
• Formatting ‘The Landing’ to submit for critiques from critters.org
• Critiquing the introductory chapter of a science fiction novel, ‘Briseus’, from critters.org
• Spending a long time going back and forth between reading aloud from the opening few chapters of ‘The Long Way Home’ and making rewrites to them. In the process, I discovered that I want to change the background of one of my supporting characters, Ereyu the ferret, and I’m not entirely sure where to start with that.
• Began working on unresolved bracket notes from a Roswell fanfic, “Runaway with me,’ and that led me into a plot audit of the later chapters to figure out where there are inconsistencies that need to be fixed and plot holes that need to be closed.

As usual, I’m rather all over the map, but I think that I’ve gotten some good stuff accomplished.

I’ll tell you a little more about the ferret stuff. I’m not quite sure why I chose to make the talking animal in “The Long way Home’ a ferret, except that I wanted it to be something small, sneaky, and able to steal things. That much generally worked out, but I didn’t really know that much about ferrets when I was writing, and was always thinking of Ereyu as a wild creature, or maybe feral – living in a human town, but not taken care of by humans. I was looking for something about which animal council to put the ferrets under over the weekend, and looked them up on Wikipedia. Right at the start of the article, there it was: ‘The ferret is a domesticated mammal…’

It turns out that that isn’t really definitive fact – there are wild varieties of ferrets, including some in Wyoming, but it really got me thinking about Ereyu in a different way. I’ve sort of assumed that there are intelligent animals of domesticated types – dogs and cats and such – in Ereyu’s world, but never really thought about them – except for the herd of smart goats that she comes across, who didn’t really appear to be a flock being tended by people.

Ereyu isn’t really anybody’s pet, but I like the idea of her having been born at a ferret breeding farm, and given to Naveli as a birthday present – with both the breeder and the giver being unaware of her intelligence, as is Naveli for a day or two before Ereyu suddenly talks in English in front of her. It’s a change that may get Ereyu into more scenes in the book, (though there are situations where she’ll still have to hide, because when Naveli is undercover, having a pet ferret visible might attract undesirable attention,) and help me flesh out her character. On the other hand, I’m a little sorry to have to rewrite the scene where Ereyu meets Naveli out in the flower patch, because I really liked it, but I may be able to keep some of the best bits.

Another thing that I’ve been doing a fair bit of is working out old bracket notes – when I proofread a first draft, I don’t like to get bogged down into anything that would take a lot of time with research, reviewing large sections of the draft, intensive rewrites, and so on, so if I notice anything, I tend to just [make a note of it like this] and keep on going. Then, when I have more time, I can search the chapter files for an open bracket, (since I don’t tend to use square brackets for anything that actually belongs in the text,) and see what I still have to take care of.

Wish me luck finishing Edmo, and getting everything else done that I want to do before April starts!