Finis! (I repeat that to further annoy McSwain, who failed to respond the last time.)

Let us celebrate! Let us, in fact, dance in the streets. I feel a conga coming on!*

I felt the need to rebroadcast this moment of history. Since I'm not writing in a fandom that any of my friends actually give a shit about, the applause for this accomplishment has been sincere but muted. I was expecting dancing boys. I received a smattering of applause, interspersed with sighs of relief and, on the part of the one who has to share living space with me, heartfelt wishes that I'll shut up about it already.**

Now for the good stuff. Deleting everything I hate, anything that annoys me, and any word that looks at me funny. (Once I wrote a character who looked at me funny...I deleted him. I have the pow-ah.)

This is the only part of writing I really enjoy. I aim at removing 10% (but I go to 20%***, if I really start having fun) of the text from my first drafts. I consider that a minimum, although I know others probably remove more.

Three solid months it took to get to this moment. Sheesh.

The deleting editing commenced this weekend. I deleted two crucial scenes and re-wrote them from scratch. Armed with hammer, chisel, scalpel, and a brand-new bottle of Wite-Out, I carved out, one hopes, a clearer emotional pathway and removed an amateurish and painfully pornographic sex scene, replacing it with one more suited to the actual story. I removed some tedious and unnecessary plot bits, contemplated, but have so far retained, some pointless recriminations around past cases, and added an egg.

The egg matters.

I took them off the streets in one scene and put them in a car.

I took them out of a car at another point and put them on foot.

I changed a minor character's name.

I wound up adding another thousand words to the beast.

This is not what editing is about! Where are the wholesale deletions? The gleeful subtractions? The sighs of relief as lines that never worked anyhow disappear from the text? Granted, I deleted a good 10,000 words during the process of completing the first draft, but still.

My delete key yearns to be used.

The only thing I have so far failed to accomplish is characterization. I have no idea who these people are.

They're not the same two that appeared in my first OaT story, that's for certain. Whether or not they resemble the characters who appeared on-screen...well, it seems that it's time to re-watch another episode or two.

In the meantime, I will let the SEN rest for a few days, possibly turning my attention to something plotless and smutty in Sentinel for a bit of light relief. At some point this week, refreshed by my dip into a fandom where characterization is easy and dialogue flows effortlessly, I will re-read the SEN and decide what, if any, major rewriting is left to be done.

Characterization, yes. But it may also be that those two scenes I've been hoping will fly as they are will require to be expanded. We can all hope otherwise, since such expansion will throw off what is currently a precariously balanced emotional structure, resulting in an orgy of re-writing of the last fifty pages.

If that happens, expect a lot of bitterness, bile, and bitching.

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*Ed. - This organization assumes no responsibility for any person who takes this as a literal command instead of a moment of manic delight. Those you who were already picking your spot on the freeway are on your own.

** The more I contemplate this, the more it aggravates me. Granted, I offer only modest congratulations to those writing in fandoms to which I am indifferent, but I am me and I don't expect to be treated the way I treat people!

If I think about it for very long, I may undertake yet another OaT story (I have three ready to go), just to prove I can.****

***Of course, at that quantity, the story develops gaps and you have to write new stuff to go in them, so the word count sometimes doesn't change much, but I don't care. I really like deleting.

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**** Okay, I haven't yet proved that I can. Not until I establish whether the SEN is an OaT story or just a story with similarly named and situated characters. But I do sometimes regret those 37 and 26 pages, respectively, of story that I abandoned in disgust some years back. I've learned a lot about turning a sow's ear into...well, not silk, but maybe a decent nylon imitation, during the SEN process. I might be able to use those on the other two ideas. I also have the outline for another story that I jotted down a few years ago and that still attracts me.