I’m one fifth of the way through the second draft of ‘Yes, Or?’ and have a chapter up on critique circle this week. I’m glad that I used Scrivener to write the first draft and it seems to be working all right for the second–I can do global replace which is what I like to do when I discover the fifth use of Still to start a sentence in one scene. At that point, I go through and get rid of all uses throughout the document, then have to put back a few. Quicker than deleting each individual one, and improves the quality of the writing overall.
I’m willing to have incomplete sentences in the second draft. Not the first. Not the third. But in the second draft that is better than overusing the same word, or phrase.
I was finding it a little difficult to cut entire paragraphs until I started a scene called ‘HERE – new cuts.’ After moving a few paragraphs over, I found it much, much easier to delete them from where they didn’t belong. It also helps to have a place to stash them while I’m working the scene since sometimes it’s the order that is wrong, not the words.
I was only gone a week, so my routines and habits are back in force except that every so often I hug myself and say, “I’m home!” It is so good to be home.
I lowered my expectations for my second draft of ‘Yes, Or?’ — I’ll get it done this week and it doesn’t really matter if it’s done a day or two earlier. So I’m doing three chapters a day, which gives me time for other stuff.
Today I spent over an hour taking pictures through the windowpane of my kitchen window. I had ordered a large canvas print of one that I took with my cell phone, but it didn’t have enough pixels so didn’t look like when enlarged. Bummer. I gave a lot of thought into picking the first picture.
Oh, well, I do claim that I like to revise. Guess this is a test of that.
My second chapter of ‘Yes, Or?’ is up for review at critiquecircle.com and someone asked me about the title. Which a friend at lunch also asked about this week, so time to write my thoughts down.
The title is because it is the third in the series.
The first two are:
Yes, And …
Yes, But–
so, Yes, Or?
follows the formula of Yes, Preposition Punctuation
And yes, I can continue this for a while. I plan on writing a book in this series every other year. Martha and I (another writer that I meet at a coffee shop on Tuesday mornings) came up with a long list of possibilities following the formula. When Barry wrote a short story in the universe of these novels, he used, ‘Yeah, Right.’