Editing on Cameron Fields & the Thieves of Time has begun!

And wow, do I ever hate what I’ve written. Taking a red marker to every single page. It’s a strange mixture of corrective fun and self-hatred. I still write WAY too passively. Action! Verbs! These things are my friend. I also explain too much. It’s almost painful to read.

I’m trying to keep my head wrapped around everything I need to do. The reason this is difficult is because there are several areas, or layers, that I need address.

Ideas: Private Eye stuff, surveillance, more cool happenings with my McGuffin.

Sectional rewrites; Entire portions that are changed or re-inserted in entirely different, slicker, cooler ways.

Language: grammer, writing itself, etc.

That list is in order for obvious reasons. I don’t want to fix language or grammar on sections that are going to be rewritten. So I’ve got to keep all the layers and contexts of editing in mind.

I’m also reading books on private investigation, special forces, C.I.A., all that great stuff and trying to incorporate cool things wherever I can.

So where writing the story was total fly-by-seat-of-pants chaos, editing is a different kind of chaos. A chaos formed out of several layers of organization mixing with one another. In that sense, it’s not really chaos, but a dense web of narrative information.

When my head hurts, maybe it’s time for mind-mapping?