Talking With TV

You guys, I am rapidly becoming convinced that my secret superpower is my apparently unstoppable ability to hide my point at the end of a paragraph/section/chapter/whatever. It is not a good superpower. I don't want it.

I am currently working on a new project on vids and vidding. My co-author and I have been talking and brainstorming and batting ideas back and forth, and we've gotten great feedback from the peer reviewers at Transformative Works and Cultures, and now we've reached the point where I have to sit down with the draft and all our notes and actually rewrite the thing into something that makes sense, has a clear argument, and so on.

The version that we turned in originally was around 7,500 words long, and the reviewers suggested streamlining it down to about 6,000 words, which we thought was an excellent plan. Of course, we also had quite a few gaps we needed to fill in. So over the past month we've made notes about what could be cut or condensed, but we've also generated some new material, and when I put it all together into one document this evening, the total is about 10,300 words.

*facepalm*

I have written enough by now to know that this is how I rewrite, like it or not: I add, add, add, add, add until the thing has blown up like a balloon (a word balloon! of death!), and then I print it all out and go through it X-ing out all the words, sentences, paragraphs and occasionally entire sections that are unnecessary, repetitive, or just plain wrong. Once that's done, I start being able to see the real shape of the thing, and that helps me decide what other pieces need to be deleted or condensed. And after enough whittling away, plus two or three rounds of reorganizing, I end up with something that might actually be worth reading. It just takes a while.

I'm a little afraid to dive back into the compiled draft tomorrow, because wow, that thing is a hot mess right now. But I'm also excited, because there are some ideas in there that I really do think are useful, and I look forward to excavating them and polishing them up and sharing them.