It took a while, but I finally have a good restructure on the first hundred pages of The Vanishing of Owen Taylor. Easy, it was not, and somehow in cutting out the unnecessary stuff, I added three pages. Don't ask me how; I have no idea. But that's how it seems to work; the more I cut, the more I add. It's the same with my finances or weight -- the more I try to control them, the more out of control they are.
I'm a lot happier starting out with the question, but I did shift Jake's concern about Owen's disappearance into the first chapter. I then wrote a two-page synopsis of what happened to Jake and Tone in Rape In Holding Cell 6 and plugged that into the beginning of chapter 2. Works better. I do need to go back over pps 81-101 to make sure I didn't cut anything out that's needed or mess up my rearranging. I have to do these checks a lot because I tend to drop words and letters as I go.
What's helping is some annotated feedback from a couple of beta readers. They went through the story for free and made notes where things were problematic or needed correcting, so I'm first going through each chapter and making those corrections, then noting their comments and deciding whether or not to incorporate them. So far, they've had some very good suggestions, and I'm not above claiming them for my own.
I also sent some of Place of Safety off to a man who lives in Derry, Northern Ireland to see if it's working as a story told by a boy from that area. It's time to start shifting my focus back o Brendan Kinsella. It's been too damn long since I last worked on his story...and it's time to get it done.
I really like this as the cover. I think the photographer was Eamon Melaugh, but I'll need to check into that.
Something that struck me is how much Donald Trump is like Ian Paisley, the Presbyterian minister who worked up as much sectarian hatred and distrust as he could in the 6 counties. He made ludicrous statements and played on people's fear of Catholics to a huge extent, just like Trump and his use of undocumented workers as the cause of everything wrong in America. Evil is as evil does...
I once read that back at the beginning of the 19th Century, Catholics and Protestants were working together to form trades unions in hopes of getting better treatment and wages. The rich men of the time got the unions banned by law then spent years in a whisper campaign to turn the Anglo-Irish against the Celtic-Irish by saying they were out to take their jobs and establish rule by Rome. It worked so well that by the time unions were allowed to form, again, the Protestants refused to let Catholics be part of them...for the most part.
Sounds to me like history's repeating itself.
I'm a lot happier starting out with the question, but I did shift Jake's concern about Owen's disappearance into the first chapter. I then wrote a two-page synopsis of what happened to Jake and Tone in Rape In Holding Cell 6 and plugged that into the beginning of chapter 2. Works better. I do need to go back over pps 81-101 to make sure I didn't cut anything out that's needed or mess up my rearranging. I have to do these checks a lot because I tend to drop words and letters as I go.
What's helping is some annotated feedback from a couple of beta readers. They went through the story for free and made notes where things were problematic or needed correcting, so I'm first going through each chapter and making those corrections, then noting their comments and deciding whether or not to incorporate them. So far, they've had some very good suggestions, and I'm not above claiming them for my own.
I really like this as the cover. I think the photographer was Eamon Melaugh, but I'll need to check into that.
Something that struck me is how much Donald Trump is like Ian Paisley, the Presbyterian minister who worked up as much sectarian hatred and distrust as he could in the 6 counties. He made ludicrous statements and played on people's fear of Catholics to a huge extent, just like Trump and his use of undocumented workers as the cause of everything wrong in America. Evil is as evil does...
I once read that back at the beginning of the 19th Century, Catholics and Protestants were working together to form trades unions in hopes of getting better treatment and wages. The rich men of the time got the unions banned by law then spent years in a whisper campaign to turn the Anglo-Irish against the Celtic-Irish by saying they were out to take their jobs and establish rule by Rome. It worked so well that by the time unions were allowed to form, again, the Protestants refused to let Catholics be part of them...for the most part.
Sounds to me like history's repeating itself.
2 comments:
Got your email Kyle, I'll be havin' a wee read at what you've sent me as soon as I get a wee bit of peace and quiet.
Thanks! Hope it's not too fiction-ish. ;)
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