Paksworld

Late last night/early this morning, finished THAT round of editing, which included a lot of formatting changes (where paragraph indentations had indented line breaks, timeline notes, chapter titles, and anything else but an actual paragraph first lines), spelling corrections, infodump chunks removed, less-than-stellar word choices, missing words (!),  and additions where necessary for clarity.  A lot of “the” is gone.  A lot of “there” that does not correctly indicate a location.  A lot of wussy-inactive verbal forms  (someone “began to” do something, or “was doing” something) and a handful of unnecessary conditionals/subjunctives (someone might/could/would/should “be doing something.”), and several handfuls of unnecessary “that.”   Anything weak, flabby, blurry, etc. revised to be crisply in focus, more concrete, more connected to senses other than vague psychic stuff.   Necessary “telling” still connected to a character’s individual understanding and expression in behavior, including speech.   Lots of fascinating (to the writer) details suppressed for lack of real connection to the immediate or next-up or recent-past storyline.  Some of this WILL appear in short fiction pieces.  (The hidden politics of the banking industry in Aarenis, for instance.  Corruption in the grain merchants’ guild.  The careful insertion of false history into the legal system.)

This morning when I started at C-1 again, the remaining stuff really stood out as “stuff” and not “story, so I’m working that today, with breaks for my very sore typing-and-mousing hand.  The farther you go, in editing, the more what else needs doing shows up, at least in the editing method I’m capable of now.  Overall wordage is moving up and down in much smaller increments.

Snippet from C-1, which I hope will be followed (if I can get the sketch finished and photographed for inclusion here) by what the character sees at a street corner in Valdaire:

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Corner of Guillder and Southgate; Charater:  “Camwyn” (all he knows of his name; astute Paksworld readers will quickly know who this is, five-six years later.)

While he fished a coin from under his surcoat, they gave clear directions.  He nodded his thanks, tossed down a coin, and rode on.  A major street as wide as this road?  There, and directly across it, the bankers’ symbol, three-coins-and-sack, painted large in yellow on a tall windowless stone building.  Below that sign was a brown arch on a white background, with the words South Gate and an arrow pointing south.

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There we are.  The pack animals was supposed to be a mule at least the size of a riding horse (around 15 hands, in modern terms, but I didn’t leave enough room on the page for longer legs, or (since I have more trouble drawing things facing right than facing left) I lengthened the body too much.  Ah, well, it’s just a sketchy thing with the use of some colored pencils.  The building would extend of the page to the right.  The brick areas are bricked up windows…it’s a bank now, originally a store with living quarters upstairs, but now…a bank.  The two signs are on areas painted white (not paper signs hung) and the unevenness of the stone underneath still shows.