This Isn't Bad

I have focused on numbers lately, but I have been doing a lot of good writing as well. I've been keeping a list of questions dating back for a year or more. The questions are pretty much the result of my not having an outline. Have I properly explained this plot point? Is this idea believable? Was this made up word previously defined?

In addition to this draft being a response to my editors comments and my revisions, I'm also working hard to answer all those outstanding questions. Lately, as I've entered the thick of the story, I'm crossing off a lot of the questions and the GIANT is shaping up quite well. The plot flows and has really become intricate.

There's substance to the story and some mystery, and not the fake mystery the story had before. When I originally wrote the GIANT, I had a rough idea of the plot tucked neatly away in my head and no idea what the ending was going to be. I remember the gleeful day when I told my wife that I knew how the book was going to end (I have since changed the ending). Not knowing what was going to happen, I inserted a lot of false mystery that did nothing but confuse the reader - as my editor pointed out to me. I groaned many times reading through my work and wrote more than one "where are you going with this?" in the margins. If I cannot answer that question now, I cut out the false mystery.

Halfway There

I have devoted a lot of time to writing lately and I find myself halfway though the edit. There are many ways to measure progress, the most obvious is quanitative. I can look at what number page I'm on in the physical print and see how many pages remain, though this is not too accurate. Through better formatting and more description, I have added about twenty pages to the digital book, so the paper version is out of date. Additionally when I printed the GIANT, I increased the size font on the second part of the book. I'm not sure how it happened, but it artificially lengthened the book.

Now I'm working in an old version of Mircosoft Word, but in the past the GIANT used to be a .rtf file. My .rtf editor had no page numbers, so to keep track of how far into the edit I was, I would measure the position of the scroll bar cursor on the screen. I would make sure not to resize the program, so I could keep consistent numbers. The length of the scroll bar was six inches. I can remember good days where I would cover a quarter of an inch in one day of editing, which would be about four percent, and that same amount of progress today is also a good day.

Now, I track progress by the pages remaining on the screen compared to the total number of pages. I'll make wholesale cuts one day and add pages the next. At the beginning of the edit I had 180 digital pages. The total number has grown to 206 at its height, most of the time hovering around 200. Therefore, there might be a day where I only take away four pages from the pages remaining column, but add three pages to the total column - which works out to a total of seven pages worked on.

Origins of the GIANT

Where does the GIANT start? Where was it born? I lived in Connecticut a few years back. I woke up from a dream one morning. A pretty powerful one. Strong enough for me to dig out an old sketchbook from a few years back and sketch out the dream (This was something I didn’t do much back then). One image of a giant skeleton on some giant table surrounded by this futuristic fence (probably mentally lifted from Jurassic Park or Starship Troopers) sitting in the woods.

The other image was of a flotilla of ships, sailing to sea. On the bow of one of the ships was a banner with an inscription. I wrote: “text about noble giant killed by man…Honorary funeral @ sea” (This I know I took from the Civil War documentary by Ken Burns. More precisely the style of the newspapers, how they would spell out text in sidebars).

One page. I put this together in late 2003, most likely judging from the pages before and after. Then I had another dream, which I didn’t write down, but remembered. That of a man driving to New York, or leaving New York, heading west? I’m not sure. Maybe it was all one in the same.

And from there? Things just fell into place.