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Voila! I present, for your reading pleasure, chapter 14 of "The Way of the Apartment Manager," in which Iruka gets teased by his aunt, a minor political crisis is peacefully resolved, Naruto distributes presents, Yukiko feels stupid, Kakashi juggles his masks, and Naga kicks someone hard.
( Apartment Manager 14 )
In other news, I'm still unemployed. But life goes on, and I've started working on my novel again -- the one I started last year for NaNoWriMo -- and that's going pretty well. Now that I actually have time to edit it, I've been going back and fixing some of the really boneheaded mistakes in the first two chapters... like, oh, say, giving Talin an actual personality that reflects in his POV sections. And tidying up Ranna's backstory. And adding more sensory details, because I always have to do that on the second draft.
I read Stephen King's On Writing a few years ago, and he has a formula that says Second Draft = First Draft - 10%. Now, that may work for him (personally, I think he'd be better if he cut 15 or 20 percent), but my formula reads Second Draft = First Draft - Digressions + Actual Description.
I never noticed how much detail I leave out until Vicky pointed that out to me about... five, six years ago? And just this past month, I read a book (Old Man's War, which is a sort of "yeah, okay, that's decent" science fiction thing) whose author has the same damn problem. He doesn't describe anything. And about halfway through the book, I realized that I felt like I was watching faceless mannikins moving across a blank white field. Usually, I sketch in a hasty mental scribble to serve as my backdrop, since I skim over descriptive passages, but here I didn't even have enough information to sketch my scribble... let alone the more detailed pictures I know other people create.
It was a funny feeling to sit there and say, "Oh my god, now I know what Vicky meant."
( Apartment Manager 14 )In other news, I'm still unemployed. But life goes on, and I've started working on my novel again -- the one I started last year for NaNoWriMo -- and that's going pretty well. Now that I actually have time to edit it, I've been going back and fixing some of the really boneheaded mistakes in the first two chapters... like, oh, say, giving Talin an actual personality that reflects in his POV sections. And tidying up Ranna's backstory. And adding more sensory details, because I always have to do that on the second draft.
I read Stephen King's On Writing a few years ago, and he has a formula that says Second Draft = First Draft - 10%. Now, that may work for him (personally, I think he'd be better if he cut 15 or 20 percent), but my formula reads Second Draft = First Draft - Digressions + Actual Description.
I never noticed how much detail I leave out until Vicky pointed that out to me about... five, six years ago? And just this past month, I read a book (Old Man's War, which is a sort of "yeah, okay, that's decent" science fiction thing) whose author has the same damn problem. He doesn't describe anything. And about halfway through the book, I realized that I felt like I was watching faceless mannikins moving across a blank white field. Usually, I sketch in a hasty mental scribble to serve as my backdrop, since I skim over descriptive passages, but here I didn't even have enough information to sketch my scribble... let alone the more detailed pictures I know other people create.
It was a funny feeling to sit there and say, "Oh my god, now I know what Vicky meant."
