Welcome, 2008
Happy new year, all. In honour of the occasion I've actually updated my profile photo, since I shaved my beard off a few months ago. Now I'm sporting a whole new hideous look. :)
Meanwhile SM4200 continues to grow. Chapter 14 has finally broken 20,000 words. The bad news is that I think there's quite a bit to go yet!
Some of what's going into the chapter lately is kind of grim. I'm starting to think that "Betrayal" should go into the chapter subtitle somewhere. But we'll see.
posted by Angus @ 10:33 pm
5 comments
5 Comments:
Happy New Year!
Well this year you should try to complete 4 chapters for us!! Thanks and good luck writing!
4177 words in 25 days. So in the beginning of June chapter 14 will pass chapter 13 in length, in the middle of July it will pass chapter 10, and by the end of October it will be longer than chapter 9. I'm looking forward to it. :-)
Well, let's see. I could release a 2000 word "chapter" every week or two, I suppose, like a lot of writers do. But frankly, I think the story hangs together a lot better when I put out larger chunks. It's just unfortunate that my chunks are pretty big ones.
When I plotted SM4200 out, lo these many moons ago, I decided that 21 chapters sounded like a reasonable length. Ever since, I've been more or less keeping to the original 21-chapter outline. It so happens that, as the subplots have multiplied and and the cast have grown, the amount that goes into a chapter has increased er, slightly. But, hey, is that my fault? :)
Well, I'm not complaining about the chapter length. I think their current lenghts are pretty nice. Reading a very short chapter every two weeks would probably feel more disjointed.
I also suppose that many short chapters would make it more difficult for you to make the story internally consistent and go towards your goal. Once you have released a chapter, you will have to live with its consequences for the rest of the story; if you later realise that something is missing or wrong, it is much more difficult to change a released chapter than an unreleased section. (Yes, I know you have made revisions to earlier chapters, but from what I have seen they have mostly been small things [but I prefered the wombats...]).
If I were writing such a story, I would be dreading finding out in chapter 20 that for things to make sense I would need to change things in chapter 2, which would require changes in chapter 3, which in turn would affect chapter 4, and so on. Luckily, or something, I don't have much of a talent for writing fiction, so I won't get into that situation. Computer software is more forgiving in that aspect; you are almost expected to rewrite the entire program from scratch once in a while. :-)
Yes, absolutely. Hell, I've already got one early scene in the chapter in progress that needs a rewrite, and depending on how things work out later on, perhaps a couple of others. If I were doing more regular releases, this would become a pain.
As you say, I've done revisions to earlier chapters before, but they're usually restricted to cleaning up the language or fixing minor errors. I think the biggest thing I've done, plot-wise, was where I rewrote the Venus-meets-cops sequence in chapter 3, and that was mostly because the original version was so painfully lame that I cringed whenever I looked at it.
(And, yeah, I know what you mean about computer software. I'm a programmer by day myself. And, oddly enough, working on a rewrite-from-scratch project right at the moment.)
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