Writing Wednesday: Rewrites

“You know when you rewrite something it just gets better and better.” Ed Wood.

In the movie “Ed Wood” Ed Wood said that line, it’s not clear if the real life Ed Wood ever said those lines or if he ever rewrote one of his movies.

Most of my literary heroes never did rewrites, famous names like Ed Wood, Isaac Asimov and so on. Unfortunately I’m not sure I want to have a real life them.

Ed Wood became famous for pushing the line of bad so far it became a masterpiece and he never made money from his films.

Asimov didn’t receive a dime from his “Foundation” series until he became famous and Doubleday bought the rights to it and re-released it, he couldn’t get a major publishing house to look at it and ended up going with an early author mill for his first four and now most famous books. The only reason he became great was his shear volume. He averaged 14 books a year as well as a short story and science article every month. That’s over 1.5 million words a year. I write a lot but that’s way beyond what I could dream of doing.

So, I won’t follow in their footsteps and will take the job of rewriting seriously. Unfortunately I am really bad at it.

With my latest novel, “The Pizza Diaries” I wrote it out and had the perfect 65,000-word novel. It was so perfect I couldn’t see how it could be improved. I sent out a query letter to thirty agents and was promptly ignored. I couldn’t figure out how they couldn’t love my masterpiece so I had a few people read it and got their feedback.

They all told me the first chapter was the worst or second worst chapter in the book. “But it makes the book have a nice circle with the beginning and the end being in the same spot.” My mind screamed. Then I wondered if that was important at all to the book. I realized it wasn’t.

So I wrote a new first Chapter that sets the tone for the whole book.

The second thing they told me was I did a horrible job with the female lead, which they felt really took away from the book as her romance with Brian was the most important plot in the book. “No it’s not,” My mind screamed again, “She’s just a side character.” Then I read it over again and I had several chapters of them alone, so it was the most important part of the book even if I didn’t mean it to be.

So I rewrote most of those Chapters and deleted a few and put in totally new chapters, to lessen the amount of time she is in the book, but give her character more depth when she’s there.

A few of the comments were gender specific, guys sympathized with Brian’s reaction to the Vampires and girls couldn’t figure out what he was on about. So I punched that chapter up and now it’s tied for my favorite chapter in the book.

So now I have an 85,000-word novel that is absolutely perfect that I will send out to a different batch of readers, so they are not influenced by the original copy, and hopefully get some totally unexpected feedback about where I tried to go one direction but the story makes it look like its doing something else.

So for a 65,000-word novel I’ve just done a little over 30,000-words in rewrites. Hopefully I’ll get better and need to do fewer rewrites on my future novels.


By Darrell B. Nelson author of Invasive Thoughts

Shut-up Stupid Sunday: Geeks Rule

Fred Phelps and his insane followers are no strangers to this blog, I had talked about them before last year.
Now they decided to pick on the wrong group. Comic Geeks. They protested the annual Comicon for some reason. What they didn’t realize is Geeks are better at getting attention then they are. It was like threatening to start a knife fight in a gun shop.

The Geeks counter-protested by chanting “What do we want?” “Gay Sex.” “When do we want it?” “Now!”

Here’s a few pictures:













So here is what I have to say to anyone who plans on starting a battle of wits with Geeks, “Shut-up Stupid, we Geeks are funnier and smarter than you, you will be out-flanked so quickly its hardly funny. Geeks rule so don’t fuck with us!”

By Darrell B. Nelson author of Invasive Thoughts

Fantastic Future Friday: Big Science

Warning:

I’m writing this post because a several thing have entered my mind at the same time from wildly different sources so the ideas aren’t as focused as I’d like them to be. Hopefully after writing them down I’ll come back in a month or so and make a polished post on these ideas.

I read a few things recently that reminded me of the importance of “Big Science” (Government run research spread out over the thousands of colleges in the nation), one was a post by a teabagger that asked what Government Research has ever turned into consumer products? I answered off the top of my head, Jet Airplanes (completely researched and developed by the Air Force then turned over to private companies). Computers (Originally purchased for the US Census, then IBM got the contract to use them for the Nazi Holocaust, then the US Navy needed them smaller to fit on ships, making them room sized but powerful enough for the government and large corporations, then NASA needed one small enough to go to the moon and the foundations of the modern PC was born). The Internet (Started as a DARPA experiment). Communication Satellites, launched by Government Rockets. GPS developed by the Air Force and the technology was given away so they would have a civilian backup. The list can go on and on.

The reply was the standard, “La, La, La, I can’t hear you.”

The second thing that got me thinking of the importance of “Big Science” was Stephanie’s post on Ask me Anything about why Space Probes cost so much.

Her post didn’t go into this but the research that goes into making the Multi-Million Dollar probes later come back to Earth, so to speak, in the form of new products. For instance the research into radiation-hardened computer chips for extended Interplanetary Missions gets put into chips for new Satellites, new Nuclear Power Plants, new Medical Equipment, ect. It’s these extreme technological feats that chip away the costs of new products. While the research in these extremes nearly always pays off in the long run, a private company can’t put billions of dollars into developing products with a 30 to 40 year payoff. For instance if you were very, very farsighted in the early 50s you could spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year building your own private Internet. By the mid-90s you’d be a Trillionaire, but in the 40 years in-between you’d be a crazy kook that no one would invest money with.

The final thing I read on this subject was Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World Revisited”. In that book he examines how the world of 1958 was moving towards the different futures that he and Orwell had written about.

One example he used was the Soviet Union, because of the science race between the US and the USSR the Soviets had to use different methods of control for different classes. For the general population the more Orwellian methods of fear and forced labor worked, but for the technological class they needed to move more to the “Brave New World” model of control. With the techies the highly ordered, no sharing of ideas, isolating people is highly counterproductive. Science and Technology flourish in an environment that allows the free exchange of ideas. So in the former Soviet Union while the people in general were under terrible oppression the scientist and engineers were given the freedom that was associated with the western world.

It was this freedom that eventually led to fall of the Soviet Union when Heinlein suggested to Reagan the “Star Wars” program. In order to keep up with the US in making this impossible project the Soviet Union would need to vastly increase its technological research. The difference between the two classes of citizens would need to be so obvious that it would lead to open revolt.

One of the biggest benefits that our current system of open research using Government Funding to pursue scientific research across thousands of campuses is the freedom from oppression as research into new frontiers needs a place of open exchange of ideas.

By increasing commitment to scientific progress, we not only get the consumer products that make life better, we get a society that encourages the free and open exchange of ideas letting its citizen’s minds to be free and open. This freedom that “Big Science” encourages leads us into a Fantastic Future.


By Darrell B. Nelson author of Invasive Thoughts