ROW80 Round 2 - 11th Update

Monday was spent editing my literature review and planning out my game narrative assignment. Tuesday was a write-off because I was at uni all day and at my nan's all evening, though I did tinker around with some world-building for Dark and Silent Waters when I got home.

Today I worked on my novella, went to the dentist to get tortured a bit, and then came home and worked on my novella some more.

Oh, my poor novella.

I was quite happy with the world-building I did on Monday, and I continued dabbling in that this morning as well. I've managed to develop a more thorough understanding of the mythology of the story - especially the laws and forces governing the supernatural characters and realms - and as a result I've fixed some of the plot holes that were in the story.

Unfortunately, this rendered a good few thousand words of what I'd written obsolete.

After the world-building stuff was done, I started reading over my novella so far, finding bits that were now either irrelevant or contradictory to how the world and the story worked. In the process I also found bits that were overly descriptive, bits that smacked of exposition and bits that were just poorly written. My inner writer curled up in a ball and cried, while my inner editor gleefully whipped out her red pen. Thus I went at it like a crazy machete-wielding word-ninja, hacking out paragraph after paragraph of narrative diarrhoea.

Looking at my word count after I'd finished was quite depressing; I'd reduced my novella from the 23/24,000 word mark to around 20,000 words. I don't really know how I could have got around it though, since I'd sort of hit a wall and wasn't sure how to continue on the path I was taking. I just hope that, now that things are clearer in my mind, I'll be able to take more steps forward and fewer steps back.

There's just no pleasing Judgemental Dog:

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