Fixing Rough Drafts At the time of writing this I am on page 202 of 250 in editing my story. I'd like to share a paragraph and how I improve it. Rough drafts are by nature clunky, repetitious and poor quality but serve the important purpose of laying the bones. Now it's time to flesh them out. " Azalyske unveiled them in the desert bramble but now of withered brown, dry, dead vines. The sun entered the final leg of its daily toil, illuminating the sky in pink and orange. Not a cloud was to be seen. Long shadows began to creep across the thorny vines in eerily shifting nets. The air still burned from the midday sun." Several changes need to be made. "withered brown, dry, dead vines" is redundant and causes the sentence to run on. "illuminating the sky in pink and orange" is well and good but it could be better. A clever metaphor or simile would improve it. "The air still burned from the midday sun" echos the word "sun...
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The Journey of Personal Growth Remember that rough draft sketch (March 16, 2021)? Here it is filled out: This is Spiral, another guardian dragon. By posting these images I hope to track my growth as an artist. I've come a long way but still feel there is much that can be improved. I'm always growing as a writer too. My book went through two rewrites; each with significant changes. Originally Sayth was not the main character but I found him to be the focus of all the action and changed that. In the second draft he and Spiral had a son but that character did nothing but muddy the water by getting in the way while serving no plot purpose. He was removed but the entire book had to be rewritten. Now Sayth and Spiral are sharing an early romance. It's just as well. My writing has improved significantly since I began in my high school days. I don't know how people can write a novel in a month; mine took ye...
Hopes and Homonyms Through this blog I'm hoping to reach out and connect with other writers, artists, nerds and gamers. Please comment if you are interested. I'm ever growing as an artist, writer and intellectual. As a writer I have many enemies. Distraction, malaise, writer's block, writer's cramp, writer's urges to revamp. But today I want to talk about one particularly perturbing one: homonyms, specifically words with the same spelling. I am no stranger to metaphor and similes but in fantasy and fictitious genres you have to be careful not to confuse the reader. I invent all manors of otherworldly creatures, concepts and environments; metaphors could easily be taken literally if utilized improperly. "The ravenous wildcat man" could mean an anthropomorphic feline race in fiction if taken literally. Homonyms further confuse the issue. Although context helps alleviate such problems I'd ha...