After the silly season I’m getting back into serious
redrafting mode on the (so far) two books of the Lenticular Series. I had
excellent feedback from my crit group buddies at Serapeum and from Stephanie
Smith. The key elements of the story are working but I need to up the human
element more and also cut a lot of backstory, all of which is fine.
The way I wrote the first draft was pretty much stream of
consciousness – although I had an overall plot structure in mind, ie I knew
where the characters were going to end up. As part of that process I was
creating and writing myself into the world as I went. That means there’s a lot
of stuff I’ve written that doesn’t really need to be in a second draft, but
which I needed to work through to develop and understand motivations and
implications. That also accounts for the human element needing more
development. My focus in draft one was to create the Kresh society and the
worlds of the Lenticular. The Earth-based Hegemony took second place, but my
secondary protagonist (who is human) has a key role to play as things develop (and
in fact will be the main protagonist in book three) so with the Kresh stuff
sorted away in my mind I can look at expanding the human side of the story.
There are no blacks and whites here, just shades of grey. So it’s important the
humans don’t just come over as ‘big bads’ because that’s too simplistic a view
for the story I’m telling.
Some writers hate rewiting, but I actually enjoy it because your
honing the language and cutting away the dead wood and, because you actually
know how the story functions and how it ends, you can also work to make individual
elements of the narrative focus more on that.
In the meantime I’m also reading through the submissions for
the first issue of Dimension6. I want to bring the very best stories I can find
to D6 readers. That means I have to read a lot of submissions, because past
experience tells me that only about 10% of subs will make it through the
selection process. We’ve had over 50 subs so far, so I’m certain I’ll find
enough for one or maybe two issues in this batch.
