wildcat

The process of rewriting Sadie Valentino's story is a convoluted beast as usual; I'm starting to the story at a different moment, before the original beginning. Suddenly a lot of things alluded to or told through dips into the past must be made solid and real and all of that jazz. This is an entertaining process, partly because the scene existed before the story did, as a postcard story. The scene is mapped out for me, with all the details and characters involved ready to come forth out of the abyss and fill themselves in. This part is going well, even as I struggle to ramp the tone up to the level I want it at. And try to avoid unneeded words, I'm trying to be more ruthless with my line edits as I go. Once I have the prototype for the first scene done I can go back through it and add descriptions of the setting and the characters to flesh them out a bit. A few of them won't be back for the rest of the story, except through allusion and memory; I want to build them more fully into the narrative, because I like all of them a lot.

Like the fact that Irma Gordon plays the saxophone to smooth over the chaos, having worked her way up through the local music scene to become the best drag king in town, which begs the question of why I always have to have characters in drag. And the saxophone is there to deflect the "piano bar" cliche. Bruno, the bouncer, needs some development beyond the muscular kind and the fact that he's in love with the bartender.

After I get all that worked out I can get started on the second scene, which used to be the first scene and is being rewritten from scratch with everything else. At this point I have to deal with the whole "murder the little darlings" head space and get rid of overly showy language - beyond the stuff that's absolutely necessary for tone - and really work through this story. It's one of my favourite things that I've written and it's a story that's intensely important to me, so I want to revise it until it's utter gold. For some reason, I feel a lot riding on this one. The point of view is limited third person but now it's more omniscient, dipping down into people's heads at times. I want to smooth that out and make the transitions work so that the narrative persona doesn't overwhelm or underwhelm.

Unfortunately, the story dipped into second person out of nowhere a few times, which is a stylistic quirk of mine that's needs to be held in check; I have this tendency to have my narrators ask rhetorical questions of the characters that come across a bit like they're asking the audience - which they are, because I love to include my audience in the act, murderous or otherwise - but in this story because I want to keep the dipping point of view, the questions have to go or else they might confuse people. Clarity is always an issue with me. That and I have to get rid of the italics, which is mostly because of a comment made in Eats, Shoots, and Leaves about how italics are often used to give emphasis to weak writing. Naturally, I got defensive and now I'm trying to avoid them like the plague, and learn how to make my prose a bit stronger and emphatic based on context.

But enough of this nattering! Back to work.