I might just be able to pull this off!
Revisions on the House
After a solid six weeks caught in my scene wrangling spreadsheet, I returned to my scrivener manuscript. The task ahead is daunting, but I feel I got this. I have to rewrite about … ah well, who am I kidding … I have to rewrite the complete second revision.
Here, I said it.
… 💔 … (Cue the sound of a breaking heart.)
Never mind. I’ll just get on with it and mark the last eighteen months as ‘refining my craft’.
The flow between the scenes and the POVs is much improved, the plot sharpened to a cutting edge, and, yes, I am going to draft in spreadsheets from now, reviewing every character and their motivations; every scene—the locations and causal event chain—to determine if they meet Philip Pullman’s ‘part of the wood’ or ‘part of the path’ test.
I borrowed this idea from his exceptional collection of essays, Daemon Voices: On Stories and Storytelling. The wood represents the world you create, and the path is the journey your story takes through it. Anything that isn’t on the path or relevant to staying on it must go.
Bear with me. Not much longer now. Or so she said.
Other news
The first locally printed New Zealand edition of The Fragments is be available on my website. It looks amazing … if I say so myself.
New here? I am New Zealand-based writer, artist and maker Minu Freitag. I have published my first book—The Fragments, an inventive mix of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Dystopian fiction—in 2022 and am currently working on the second book in The Spheres Series—The House—due for release in the first half of 2025.
