Snow Prep Editing

 

Hi guys!

 

We got snow last night! Like, a lot of snow. The flat spots are about 12 inches deep. The drifts are considerably taller.

 

 

I spent yesterday getting everything ready: filled water jugs, bought milk and bread, and filled the bathtub.

 

I had been gone all day Saturday, so I figured I'd better do some catch up on the pile of dishes and laundry. No one wants to be out of power AND have nothing to eat off of or wear.

 

Church ended up being cancelled, so I was able to get the hatches battened down.

 

So I spent the rest of the day working on The Guns story. I printed it off about a week ago. (My printer was NOT happy about that, and I'm now out of ink) and I've been reading through it in my spare time, marking anything that is worded funny, needs changing, or just generally sucked.

 

And let me tell you, there's a lot of it that just generally sucks. Thank God I was writing in blue ink instead of red, otherwise I think I would have lost heart and threw the whole thing in the wood stove.

 

But, yesterday, I finished the read through part of it, and came to the conclusion that the story is very much worth saving, and that I can in fact do it, so I fired up the laptop and started implementing my notes.

 

Know what my note on the very first page said?

 

This entire opening scene is boring.

 

Ouch. Not the way I wanted to start out. So I set to brainstorming how I could make it hit home faster, cut to the action, raise the stakes right away.

 

It took several hours, I'm not gonna lie. I got desperate and made coffee and cookies in the middle there somewhere. I searched Pinterest, because I realized I had no solid grasp of what half the characters looked like.

 

And I did it! I broke through! It will probably need some more tweaking when I do the second read through, but I'm confident that the opening scene I came up with is much better than the original. I kept the original story and am doing the edits all in a separate document, so if I cut something I want back later, I'll have both versions.

 

I slaved away at it. I had bursts of pure genius.

 

Jarod came home in the evening and I was so excited to tell him the groundbreaking steps I'd taken that day.

 

I'd made it all the way to halfway through the second page.