This week on It’s Always Sweltering in Revision, we begin with a scene that received only nitpicks. That felt too easy and may need more substantial changes, but I can’t fix a problem I can’t identify. I’m due to send myself an updated draft and read the latest batch of scenes for speech therapy, so we’ll see if anything jumps out in audible form. (I’m currently therapy-reading R. F. Kuang’s Babel, though, and don’t want to stop. That’s the only reading time I get!)
Moving on to the road trip portion of our adventure!
Minor continuity fix: I wrote earlier that she’s not going to wear a certain item until there’s a need to do so, yet here she’s wearing the item days before there’s a need to do so. Did some prop management to correct.
One of the go-backs was to congest the city streets. No one departed the abandoned city, so… where’s their stuff parked? I definitely have a sense that the place is a theme park where everything has been neatly put away for the night, which is not correct. Someone ought to fix that. I demand to speak to the manager! Oh,right…
Since that’s a descriptive thing, though, I’m allowed to postpone doing it properly until the grudge draft. I did put the note directly into the relevant spots in the manuscript so I can’t miss it again.
Heroine’s second brush with death due to crumbling infrastructure also seems okay except for nitpicks. It’s action, she’s emotional about it, it forces Hero to volunteer information he was cagey about immediately prior, and there will be lingering effects. Seems to tick all the necessary boxes as is.
It’s followed by a brief transitional scene that’s marked in the synopsis as “probably not necessary so could be cut” because it doesn’t move the plot forward. However, it contains some good characterization that doesn’t fit elsewhere. I can’t even duct tape it to the end of the previous scene due to a necessary space-time gap. Cutting it out leaves the adjacent scenes grinding together uncomfortably sans cartilage.
“Rules” say scenes must be multipurpose. While I do believe an overwhelming majority of scenes should be deep, resonant chords rather than a single note, a 250-word transition that only characterizes is not going to perceptibly injure the surrounding 182,300 words.
The occasional cowbell emphasizes the sophistication of the symphony. (New epitaph just dropped.)
