Month: March 2018

Dev edits

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Hello everyone,

My dev edits are currently driving me up the wall. Dev edits, or developmental edits, are supposed to help you with the structural aspects of the story you are trying to tell. My story, Yaliana, is a sci-fi lesbian romance. I love this story, but right now, it’s making me crazy.

First of all, I have an issue of nomenclature. I am talking about a different planet with different animals and plants. They are not really named, and my editor tells me that I need to come up with a system of naming these things. The main problem is that these characters have no frame of reference for these animals and plants. My characters have never lived on earth, and most of these animals are dangerous, so my characters’ main concern is not calling them by a name, but rather, staying alive.

Secondly, I have a character who I created who contradicts himself with his actions and words, and this was not done on purpose. I have to rewrite dialogue and different scenes in order to make him more consistent.

Thirdly, I have two stubborn characters who need to either show or reflect on their feelings for one another more openly. Right now, most of the story is focused on the action, whereas romance readers are concerned with the relationship. I need to get them to talk more to each other and more to themselves about their developing love story.

Those are my three problems, and as you can see, they are rather extensive and systemic problems. I’m pretty sure that I can fix them, but it requires a lot of time and energy. Dev edits are really important for worldbuilding, especially in sci-fi and fantasy worlds. I hope to ensure that my novella makes sense by the time I finish.

Still working on it!

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I didn’t get my dev edits done by the 19th. 

But such is my life. I’ve been writing my thesis and marking for an engineering class, which I am finding extremely challenging. Good news first: I have finished the first draft of my thesis. It is done, and now all I need to do is revisions. Bad news: marking is taking up all of my time, and March is probably a write-off in terms of getting any revisions done. 

What does this mean for writing?

I get nothing done for writing for a very long time. Perhaps not even until summer. This makes me very sad, but there is nothing that I can do about it. Hopefully one day, I will be working less on my schooling and more on my writing. It would be nice, at least. 

My dev edits might take a while to figure out. Some of the things that need fixing are structural things, which means very carefully revising some sections so that the world makes sense again. I’ll talk more about dev edits later in more detail.

I accidentally started writing something new. It’s supposed to be a short story with no worldbuilding. It’s a contemporary story set in my hometown, so it’s more of an ode to where I grew up than anything else. I hope that I can get across to my audience what Prince George is like. I don’t know whether I will publish this novella or not. I guess I’ll ask beta readers about it.

Ace aro dragon story is still stalled.  Who knows when I’ll get back to that one. 

One day I’ll do a poll and see what people think I should actually finish and submit to a publisher.

I guess we’ll see what the future holds. Right now it’s not really clear.