Welcome back to my weekly series where I note the ups and down of editing my queer dieselpunk (murder) mystery! Read the first post in the series here.
Day 43, June 23rd, 2020
Almost reached the end of chapter 14 today, but I’m too tired. (Did some work on the other novel, though, I admit.)
Had to go back into chapter 11 to transform a few armchairs into sofas because a scene I’m pretty fond of in chapter 14 requires some quality coverage. Luckily, my beta hadn’t managed to reach chapter 11 yet, so I had no issues placing the change straight into the document I shared to her through Google Drive.
Day 44, June 24th, 2020
Oooops. (Worked on a short story and maybe helped start a magazine today.)
Day 45, June 25th, 2020
Felt too bad about the prospect of skipping two days in a row again—so I just didn’t.
Finished chapter fourteen, hurray! Two funny things happened while I was at it. Firstly, I discovered that my MC2 has little to no motivation for doing a pretty unexpected thing in the chapter. Yeah, I’ll make sure I didn’t manage to explain it away somehow later in the copy—but I doubt it.
And secondly, I realized I had used a single word—intruder—eight freaking times in a single. scene. Managed to get it down to three—unfortunately, the word is a rather good fit for the scene in question.
Day 46, June 26th, 2020
Heloooo, chapter fifteen. I so don’t want to hang out with you today, but I really want to work on other things this year, so here we are. How ya’ doin’?
Okay, did a whole scene, I’ll call it a day and hope I’ll get more work done tomorrow, when I’ve got a free morning. The scene wasn’t all that bad, and the next one is even more fun. The tone of the novel seems to have changed a bit, though. It started all serious and stuff, and now… it’s mostly sneaking around and flirting? And I like it a lot more…
I’m officially ready to be done with editing Johnny’s Girls. Let’s see if I can race myself and get it over with in the next week and a half, shall we?
Day 47, June 27th, 2020
Managed to fuck up my eye by too much screen time yesterday, so I had to take a break instead of honoring yesterday’s plans. Got a few paragraphs in, though. It’s easy to get carried away when you’re writing about characters you love. ♡
Day 48, June 28th, 2020
Bye bye, chapter fifteen! Wondering whether my inspiration for a character’s design will be as transparent to the readers as it is to me. We’ll see.
Day 49, June 29th, 2020
It’s that time of the week when I need to post a new post from this series and face the fears to do one other thing I’ve been delaying for over a year now, which’ll bring me closer to actually working on writing for more hours every week than I currently am.
But first, Karolina.
The sad story of the uneducated historic writer continues with the tragedy of the word bonkers. It’s a lovely, old-fashioned word, isn’t it? Luckily, as with many other words I haven’t learned in our primary school English lessons, I asked the internet about terms like ‘first use’ etc. Bonkers, apparently, wasn’t necessarily around before 1945-ish. Which means there’s no way my characters would use it in May of 1945, and in a location which wasn’t affiliated with the UK. So, so sad. (As usual, I’m completely ignoring the fact that my characters aren’t speaking English in the first place. It’s a concession I choose to make in order to at least invoke a historical feeling. YMMV.)
Got a full page in today before life happened.
Need to pick my speed up, arrrrrgh…
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Photo by Ant Rozetsky on Unsplash.
Vesna Kurilic 