Feb 2nd Entry - ABNA Madness

Whew.

Seriously. Getting Specialist Sparks ready for the ABNA was a serious drag through broken glass, barbed wire, and antipersonnel mines. Okay, it was just painful.

I started three weeks ago with a MS that was 91,000 words, but only two acts of the story. I brought in some material I had from the sequel - completely unedited - for the third act (my friend Terry Mixon suggested a while back I use the traditional screenwriting three-act format. I've used the three-times rule in a lot of the subplots, but now applied it directly as the macro-plot). I added 23,000 words doing that.

Then, I added 4,000 more, for the 'pinch scenes', where I remind you, the reader, that there's a threat brewing over the horizon (in this case, in the Southern Hemisphere...) and that rust never sleeps... I won't ruin the story for you. This left me at 114,900 words.

The genre - Action/Adventure - wants less than 100,000 words, as close to 90,000 as a first-time novelist (I have no prior sales to point to to justify a longer book). This caused me to have to edit...

I lost about 2,000 words right off the bat in kicking out unneeded or too-heavy-handed-repetition-of-a-theme scenes. Yeah, we know Sandy's a great soldier, one scene's enough, not three... that sort of thing.

I then got painful, and got rid of some cherished scenes developing a relationship between Kate and Sandy, and trimmed even more from two really key monologues. That was painful, because they were strong, but the story still stands with weaker monologues.

Feeling bad, I then shifted the attack to wordcount, and started trimming descriptive clauses. Stuff that really wasn't needed - characters looking at scenery, wondering about inconsequential stuff. Figure I lost about 9 words a page that way.

Next, a purely mechanical attack on passive voice and contractions. I also broke up complex, multi-clause (run on?) sentences, making them no more than three, mostly two, clauses long. This lowered the Fleisch readability score a bit, too. I finished with 1% passive-voice: there are some phrases you cannot, especially in dialogue, make active. These include "the formation was dismissed", if you don't want to spend words on who led the formation (think a class graduation - the leader isn't part of the story), and "Sandy was shot". Oh well.

This got me down to 99,400 words.

More painful elides and minor scene/sentence edits.

98,700.

Then I got to write a bio, pitch, synopsis, anectdote, and other impedimentia for the contest.

The pitch was tough. This would cut the contest entries by a factor of 20 - from 10,000 possible entries to 500. I did my best to answer the points they asked for - and spent less on the synopsis than I might have. I also used the pronoun "I" in the pitch, something most other people avoided - but they wanted to know my motivation and qualifications for writing a novel, and who I aimed it at.

After the submission period's over, I'll post up the pitch here.

Anyway, after the game yesterday (there was a game? The Superbowl...), I hovered over my keyboard, and at 10:00 AZ time, got my entry into the 2009 ABNA contest in.

Whew.

A drag through rocky riverbeds, thornbushes, and pine forests. But I'm done... now I just get to wait until 16 March when I find out if the pitch was good enough.

More later...