In addition to my independent writings and the articles I publish here, I can be found on Examiner.com, WhatCulture!, and Durham Today. My articles are indexed by website below.
Hey everybody, what’s happening? I’m in that weird stage between not wanting to work on stuff, not wanting to watch anything, not really wanting to chat with anyone, and trying to stay up even though I am yawning like crazy. Seems to be the perfect time to write a NOVEL EDITING UPDATE!
So, where are we? A month and a half ago, I had just finished my first pass at cleaning up the vomit-draft of my debut novel, “A Distant Horn”. I spoke about how I was gonna print that sucker out by the end of July and read it line for line and mark it up with a red pen. Well, I can tell you now that I have indeed done that! So yay, brownie points for that!
Even though I’d JUST read through the whole thing, I still didn’t feel like I was done yet (ahhhh hell nah), so, like, at 4 in the morning one day, I made a self-published proof copy on Createspace (including a terrible, generic cover), and ordered it before I realized it was probably a bad idea. To help me see the story as fresh, I decided to “search and replace” all character and location names with completely new ones. If I was reading about different people, I might be able to see things a little differently. (The only name I couldn’t change was the town of “Led”, which, upon first attempts, changed EVERY “led” to whatever the hell name I had cooked up, leading to words like “stumbled” and “grumbled” to be “stumbGondor” or “grumbGondor.” My 11-pm self might have caught that, but my 4 AM self? Not a chance.)
Do I care enough to fix them?
Anyway, the proof came a couple days later (early!) and I started reading it right away. I felt like I NEEDED to have the story in my hands, in a BOOK form, in the font it’s going to be in (Garamond, please!). You can look at stuff on screens all you want, but you won’t know what it looks like until you have that shit right in front of you. And this time, while reading it, I would not do so much of a “prose” pass, but more of an overall tone/enjoyment pass. How was the flow? Was I having a good time? Was I not having a good time in some parts? Does it ever get boring? Is it polished enough to be presentable?
When studios test television shows, they’ll have people watch them with these little dials. The dials, which people move either up (for happy) or down (for not happy) throughout the episode, represent people’s enjoyment. This way, producers and studios can see exactly in real time where the audience is having a good time and where the show might be lacking. Does the quality dip here? And if it dips, then why? Well, since I seem to be a crazy freaking perfectionist (and have a lot of time), I DID THIS MYSELF by chapter. Let’s take a look!
As you can see, both the “quality of writing” and the “enjoyment” lines (I forgot which ones are which) dip around the middle before going back up to being fun again. Even though none of my friends cared about this when they’d read it, I think I might have the middle a littttttle too dark than is probably acceptable in the current story. The change in tone kind of felt like watching the goofy Batman and Robin, then switching to The Dark Knight for a second, then back to Batman and Robin. Tonally, it kind of messes things up. So I’ll be looking forward to CHANGING THAT TOO, when I go through this thing for a third time. (Note: My book is hopefully better than Batman and Robin.) But seriously, the story got a little nasty in the middle there. Maybe I put out all my editing frustrations into it, I dunno. Either way, I traveled that narrative and tonal path and know it wasn’t right, so yeah, at least I know it’s wrong.
Well this is getting pretty long, so I guess I should totally wrap it up. I could keep going on forever and ever, but you probably have your own novels to get writing (so get typing!). So yeah, I’m sort of avoiding the big cave-troll in the room here, but I think, there were, on a couple occasions, places where I said this book would be released November 1, 2013. Hmm. . .
When I saw Timothy Zahn speak about “Star Wars: Scoundrels” last year, he said the publishing houses take about nine months after a manuscript is delivered to find all the typos and do all the cleaning and get the artwork, etc, and publish the thing. I thought to myself Hey, nine months, that sounds doable! I mean, think about it, it’s a whole NINE months! But then, as I started editing, I realized that writers’ primary jobs is WRITING. And, in addition to that, they have editors and all that junk that do the crappy, typo-hunting stuff for them (at least that’s how it works, right?) So, nine months for me isn’t really enough time to finish everything because, y’know, I have a full-time day job that isn’t writing about fun goofy adventure stuff. (At least not yet :P)
As seen here, Timothy Zahn’s day job is actually “astronaut”
I realized, that over the course of nine months, I will have spent basically 1710 hours either at work or driving to and from. That equals basically TWO MONTHS AND ELEVEN DAYS taken out of my editing schedule. I mean, sure, I didn’t really start editing until May (instead of February. . .) but I’MNOTTALKINGABOUTTHATRIGHTNOW. I guess what I’m trying to say is I won’t finish this thing in whatever 30-some-odd days are left. The way I see it, you guys are all my friends I’ve invited to a dinner party, and my novel represents the homemade burgers (or chicken or noodles) I am cooking. My responsibility, as a cook and friend, is to make sure the chicken and burgers are cooked thoroughly, lest you get all sick and hate me forever and never come over for more dinner parties. As much as a cook can’t serve you semi-pink burgers, nor can I, as an author, deliver to you a semi-cooked novel. Gotta make this sure this book “al dente”, y’know what I’m saying?
Anyway, onto pass number three (million!) Thanks for being interested and patient. The adventure will come, I promise! Let’s shoot for 2014!
**note: The featured image is not the official cover. I Googled some fantasy stuff and made it in like 5 minutes. Looks kinda cool, though. . .***
Hello there, everyone! It has come to my attention that I have, as of this year’s past six and a half months, written only FIVE articles to post on here. I do mean to write more, but a certain DEBUT NOVEL seems to be taking up all my time. (Like, seriously, all my time!) To not disappear completely, I’ll write something here and tell you how the whole editing process is going.
Editing! . . .yay . . .
Over the past couple weeks (or months…or years?), I have made massive headway on my revisions to the original text, which was written for National Novel Writing Month 2010. That’s right, I wrote 50,000 words in twenty-something days, which means that pretty much all the original text is unusable. What’s that quote? “Marry in haste, repent at leisure”? The writing equivalent would not doubt be “Write in haste, re-write the whole fucking thing at leisure”. In addition to writing a like Cheetah on catnip, I really had no idea what the in-world setting was. I was just flying by the seat of my pants. The world mostly wouldn’t be established until the second book which (which I wrote the next year),which meant that I had to go back and FIX everything. You’d never guess, but if you’re backstory changes, so does a lot of your current story. (Like, everything. . .)
As of two nights ago, I finished my first pass of the entire novel. Well, what I mean to say is that I reached the end of the original text. I still have to go back and add in some SEVEN new little scenes which are either new or are complete re-writes. But that shan’t take long. I’ve contractually obligated myself to have a final, printed, double-spaced, and bound copy of the draft by the end of this month. If I fail to do so, I owe my roommate twenty bucks. (8 bottles of Charles Shaw wine…) After that, it’ll be onto the second pass, where I’ll read the whole damn thing AGAIN, but this time off the printed page.
Hopefully with less edits.
After fixing the second pass, then it’s off to a couple pre-determined beta readers, which’ll be very exciting, for instead of just rambling about the book to friends, they’ll actually get to read it and see how it is. It’ll be good to finally have some objective eyes looking at it, too.
If there’s one thing I have learned about editing/revising a previous work, it’s that it’s an IMMENSE amount of work. Sometimes even more work than actually doing the initial writing itself. I feel like I went into this process with the domestic-care-metaphor assumptions of straightening up a room. Just a little messy. Straighten this up, straighten this out, right? Well, as I started cleaning, I soon realized I was gonna have to build a whole fucking addition to the house. And then I realized that my house wasn’t just a simple one, but three separate ones, and I need to plan and build bridges between them that were structurally sound and wouldn’t crumble under their own weight. The amount of work, to be completely honest, kind of blindsided me.
In order to help me with the crazy task of planning the set-ups, pay-offs, and callbacks of an estimated 180,000-word trilogy, I wrote a long, detailed summary of all three books. The super-summary itself turned out to be some 6,000 words. And that’s not including the some 70-year chronology I included, that detailed the backstory of the entire thing and all the characters since birth and. . .hey, what are you doing with that straight jacket?
J.R.R. Tolkien is known for saying that The Lord of Rings, the massive sequel to the shorter The Hobbit, “grew in the telling”. While I’ve always let my stories and music/all creative stuff take a somewhat organic route to forming (because I am a creative hippie), I had no idea that the novel I started writing for fun in November 2010 would EXPLODE to be a full-fledged trilogy with a long backstory. But the most interesting thing about that fact is that the story CAN’T be anything else. If it wanted to be a short, simple story, then it would be. The story’s really calling the shots here, I’m just writing it all down. I feel like the story itself knows what is best for it, and all I can do is obey its commands.
“Write a new introduction for the company’s arrival to Falkenbir, or else!”
This practice of obeying the creative work reminds me of one of my favorite quotes, this one from Rammstein’s lead guitarist Richard Kruspe. Here he’s talking about music, but I think it works for any type of creative work: “You are part of a machinery, and the music lets you know where it wants to go, which direction it wants to take. . .It is the case that when you have a song, it lets you know if the song should be stately, aggressive or rhythmic – whatever. It always tells you, and when you recognize that, when you are sensitized to this and recognize this, you can’t do anything wrong. We [Rammstein] got this wrong in the beginning. We thought we should try to press into a certain direction. You can’t do that. You can only follow.”
And follow, indeed! Even if it means re-routing your entire story and writing thousands of words of new material (which also means throwing away thousands of words of old material), you gotta listen to your story so it can be the best it can be. I probably should have been writing in “A Distant Horn” while writing this, but oh well, this was a nice, and most welcome, break.
Oh yeah, and the book is about a perilous quest to find a great warrior that can defeat a ancient, super-evil Lich. Didn’t think I had mentioned that yet.
Casey Poma 
