NaNoEdMo progress - 03/03

[wordwhacker]

Editing. More like, "re-working from the ground up". But that's a form of editing, right?

... Right?

I did an hour of editing work today, though I didn't touch my original prose. Instead, I took a long, hard look at the aliens and all of the plot holes that sprouted up around them.

I've lovingly referred to them as my "Random Aliens". They were great for NaNoWriMo. Need a plot point? Throw in an alien! But in the end they felt empty; they didn't have a well-defined purpose, or organizational structure, or clear intelligence. They were just... random aliens. They weren't very menacing, as a result, which made the "suspense" of the story flop.

So they've been re-worked (though they need a bit more attention before I'll be completely happy with them). My next project is a related one - to come up with some rhyme and reason to their technology and how it works (in relation to their physiology, which has changed slightly in the re-vamp), and how their mothership is laid out. That'll give me a better idea of how the stow-aways manage to dodge detection, and how to handle the "oh no! Paul is captive!" situation. (Yay, I get to make lame layout drawings!)


Progress: 01:00 / 50:00


I'm settling in for an hour of editing... with any luck I'll update again before the night's out. If I, y'know, actually edit any.

Comments

[cassaclyzm.livejournal.com]

You know, now that I've said it, I'm going to have to have Casey have a line of dialogue at some point where she says something like, "I don't know, it was a... a... random alien!"

I mean, heck, I'm writing kids' SF, so I'm not too worried about the hard science merit of my Random Aliens and their mysterious ways. But, um, they do have to make SOME sort of sense - which, at the moment, they sort of, um, don't. (Actually, the worst thing is the fact that the only reason they don't *catch* my 12-year-olds is that I don't write it happening.)