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June 7, 2007
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The first chapter to my second volume. We'll see how this goes. Opening up last time was easy. A lot of the
entire volume was all about introducing everything. Melfina, Stark, Luna, West Luna, the surrounding area,
etc. This time that's all set.
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My first attempt at writing the opening paragraph was the most boring thing you could ever read.
A new day dawns, and Melfina goes about life as normal. She was rich. She had never been rich before. Yet her
life isn't normal anymore. Melfina is a scribe who spends the time not needed to run her shop constantly reading
and researching and trying to understand her craft. Yet she runs through the motions cause this is what she does.
Of course that was an early draft. My first run through usually is a lot of plainly stating what I want said or
the feeling the chapter is supposed to give off, but not matter how I refined this, it would still have been
boring.
This was definitely a case of "Show. Don't tell." Start off with some yelling! Worked well for the first
volume. Just get right down to it. Melfina's being a bum, so it would be stupid to try to get her thoughts out
about what's happened to her, unless I was aiming to be borning for some reason. So take one of her
friends and let her friend express how she feels about Melfina.
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The document is also another case of how missing notes affects my work. My first thoughts on what Melfina's
notes on the book she wants to write were much better. But I didn't have a note book with me to write it down,
and I didn't even take the notes down in my Treo. I think I was driving or something. This came out alright,
but I know my initial reaction was better.
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12/30/2008 - I haven't written a new chapter since August. I definitely want to finish off this volume, and
I've begun outlining Volume 3. The main problem is that I've misplaced my flash drive with all of my notes on it.
so working on Volume 3 will be difficult. And if I'm remembering right, I have a fully completed Chapter XVI
and have done work on XVII and XVIII as well, so I don't want to re-write those chapters because, like always,
my initial versions tend to have a lot of good work in it that I always feel is better than dry re-writes. They
have a quality of feeling more natural.
So in the mean time I'm going to be rereading all the chapters of Volume 2, and while I'm doing this, I might
as well do revisions. And implement the version number idea that I wanted to do since I want to do revisions.
Rewrite to version 2.10. A net change of -40 words to 1,261.
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07/09/2009 - Rewrite to version 1.50. I took a much longer break than
expected. Again. But I do want to at the very least finish this volume. I wanted to just read through the
chapters again to catch myself up, but there were just too many changes that I needed to make. This time a lot of
the trends seemed to be getting rid of a lot of exposition in the dialogue. A net change of -14 words to 1,247.
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07/27/2009 - Rewrite to version 1.60. I've begun reposting my chapters at
the White Stagg Inn forum at uo.stratics.com. And in doing so have caught a couple mistakes. Two revisions to
revisions I just made on the 9th because I didn't carefully read the new content that I wrote, and one minor change
from "beach" to "lakeshore" in one of Cadence's early paragraphs. A net change of -5 words to 1,242.
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