You polished First Battle to perfection (as perfect as it could be given the initial text, I mean), and in return I completely butchered Ashes. :(
Oh, you didn't -- I mean, I already knew that there was a problem with it, which is why I sent the chapter to you in the first place. If anything, you pointed out the bits that were actively worth keeping, although I'm not sure I shall be able to retain them all in the current rewrite.
It's just that -- quite apart from everything else, e.g. my major psychological hangups about revision versus fresh composition (as opposed to line-editing, which I'm quite good at) -- the more I abbreviate the material, the more the Necessary Information that I'm trying to slip past the reader seems to stand out as gratuitously obvious. Although to be fair some of that *is* specifically due to the issues of rewriting, in that the ideas are not arising one from another as a natural flow of thought but are defined in advance, and then have by hook or by crook to be somehow inserted...
But I *am* still working on it. I wrote 55 words today --24 during the half-hour walk down to the library, and 21 on the return journey-- and begin to see a possible route through at least to Lady Blaymere's. I don't know how many words in total I have got at this point: it is three pages so far, but three pages absolutely covered in crossings-out.
Nor am I confident that the result will actually do the job, but it will at least be mostly different. I kept trying to insert favourite bits of the old text verbatim, and they kept not really fitting in :-(
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2025-02-19 09:15 pm (UTC)Oh, you didn't -- I mean, I already knew that there was a problem with it, which is why I sent the chapter to you in the first place. If anything, you pointed out the bits that were actively worth keeping, although I'm not sure I shall be able to retain them all in the current rewrite.
It's just that -- quite apart from everything else, e.g. my major psychological hangups about revision versus fresh composition (as opposed to line-editing, which I'm quite good at) -- the more I abbreviate the material, the more the Necessary Information that I'm trying to slip past the reader seems to stand out as gratuitously obvious. Although to be fair some of that *is* specifically due to the issues of rewriting, in that the ideas are not arising one from another as a natural flow of thought but are defined in advance, and then have by hook or by crook to be somehow inserted...
But I *am* still working on it. I wrote 55 words today --24 during the half-hour walk down to the library, and 21 on the return journey-- and begin to see a possible route through at least to Lady Blaymere's. I don't know how many words in total I have got at this point: it is three pages so far, but three pages absolutely covered in crossings-out.
Nor am I confident that the result will actually do the job, but it will at least be mostly different. I kept trying to insert favourite bits of the old text verbatim, and they kept not really fitting in :-(