Wednesday, 28 August 2002

A good evening of rewriting. I went through and fixed most of the mistakes people had found. (I need to do one more pass to double-check on typos and such.) Then I trimmed out most of the stuff that hadn't contributed to the story. (There are some thing that I haven't been able to cut so far. They'll get another close look, too.) Then I went in and added the information that people had complained was missing.

That was the easy part. Now I need to make the hero's motivation clear, and also make his people's motivation clear: Why did they do such a thing in the first place? Why is he continuing their work? Their plan didn't work. Maybe it never could have worked. But that's not an insuperable obstacle. I don't need to show how it could have worked, I just need to provide some clues that let the reader imagine, "Yes, these people could have acted this way."

Clarion classmate Beth Adele Long is going to be writer-in-residence at the Kerouac project, in the house Kerouac lived in, in Orlando. They've already got a page up for her. She'll be there in September through November. I am so jealous.