Biker Mice From Mars: Evil Jack: For Worse 24

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Unofficial tally based on my paper edits that haven't been made to the file yet. But how is that for trimming? I think I have finally found a method that works, even if it's a rather math heavy method.

Take the word count. I usually just use the number Microsoft Word spits at me. Take ten percent of that amount, that's the tally of what needs to go away. Go through the manuscript and count the words cut and added with notations in the margin. Continue until minus ten percent has been reached.

It works easiest in sections. Though I have found that by using this method, when I add up all the trimmed sections, ten percent of the total wordage is gone.

I also found the spots to break the story up for FanFiction.Net teasing. So I finished my Big Rocks for this project this week.

Tin Man fill-out form

Story: please provide a link
Author:
'Verse:
Rating use your best judgment if one is not provided
Author's summary:
Characters/pairing:
Warnings: please DO NOT warn for slash or het, this should be made apparent in the characters/pairing line

Recced because: a few sentences on why you are reccing this story

http://community.livejournal.com/tmcrossovers/544.html

Posting here until I can actually fill it out. In the mean time, how the hell do you contact anyone inside LiveJournal without a LJ account?

*Grumbles about sending an email should be required*

Finally got some free time to fill this out appropriately. So I will probably have to edit the first chapter on FF.net when I get home. *Sigh*

Story: Tin Man: Dragons and Ninjas
Author: KLCtheBookWorm
'Verse: Tin Man, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Legend of Zelda
Rating: Mature
Author's summary: Five months after the Eclipse, Longcoat attacks and dragon sightings terrorize the population, so DG and her companions set out to save the O.Z. again and cross paths with a Slipper on a mission of his own.
Characters: DG, Cain, Glitch, Raw, Zack Baker, Jeb Cain, Azkadellia, the Queen. Pairings: DG/Cain
Warnings: Uses original characters from author's TMNT and Zelda fanfiction, but you really don't need to read them to know what's going on.

Tin Man: Pirates of the Nonestic Ocean

I didn't name the body of water, blame L. Frank Baum. What I did do was come up with a bloody marvelous scenario to introduce pirates and the Gnome King to the O.Z. So I wrote it all out to get the story right because it will be ages before I get to work on it. I finally wrapped it up today, and was noting that I wanted to keep the POVs limited to Cain and DG, when I realized what I wrote out was a Master Scene Summary without detailing the locations, POV of each, and the time frame.

It would have been less work to do it that way! *headdesk*

But I roughly did the same thing with Tin Man: Dragons and Ninjas, so I think I need to keep doing them.

Creepy

http://www.cryptomundo.com/cryptozoo-news/windigo-head/

Have no idea what to do with it, but I think it fits in the Fairy Tale universe

Biker Mice From Mars: Evil Jack: For Worse 23

Biker Mice From Mars: Evil Jack: For Worse

Progress Bar from Writertopia

Sheesh, ain't I finished with this story yet? Apparently not.

• Started writing: July 18, 2007
• Finished first draft: February 22, 2008
• Started typing: September 9, 2007
• Finished typing second draft: March 1, 2008
• Started editing: March 2, 2008
• Finished second draft edits: April 17, 2008
• Started third draft: August 10, 2008

No one got back to me about beta reading and I got distracted with the ethnography of doom and then Tin Man: Dragons and Ninjas. A thousand apologies because it should never take me this long to finish anything written.

Currently, I'm working on the last of the edits, trying to cut the words down to between 22,099 and 21,827 (I got messed up on my word count somewhere). As long as it lands lower than the current amount, color me happy. Plus I'm trying to decide where are the best cliffhangers for when I post it on FanFiction.Net. I have no time table for that because FF.net now limits the amount you have in the Document Manager and Tin Man: Dragons and Ninjas currently has it filled. Plus I really want it to be part of the whatever replaces the Yahoo group that I haven't worked out yet.

Tin Man: Dragons and Ninjas 1

Tin Man: Dragons and Ninjas

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Perfect writing storm is the only way I can describe what happened to me with this story. I started writing it on June 4th and finished the first draft on July 17, 2008. I can't remember when I have last wrote a first draft that fast. And it wasn't a wimpy manuscript, 79,449 words.

I finished the second draft on August 3, 2008 and whittled the manuscript to 71,503 words. Started posting to FanFiction.net that day too. No point to waiting because most people at the Yahoo group are fans of my BMFM stuff and I'm working on changing how that's all announced anyway when I get to the website updates. It's a weird hangup, but I just assume people won't like my obsessions so I don't expose them.

The prefect writing storm drove all thoughts of doing metrics on the story out of my head. Thinking back on it, I have to wonder where I went. It was like automatic writing only I remember stopping to do research. I'm not complaining about it, just noting that it's odd.

So here's links to the comments I made over at Blank about Tin Man: Dragons and Ninjas:

• June 11: This is the way writing used to be
• June 20: What day is it
• June 24: Zero said years
• July 10: Not really dead
• July 17: I FINISHED
• August 4: Return to Normal, I Think

And to make up for the lapse of metrics on my part, here's the four theme songs for Tin Man: Dragons and Ninjas.

"Home" by Breaking Benjamin


"Suffer" by the Echoing Green


"I Turn to You" by Melanie C


"Save This Fairyland" by Angelzoom

Strix Metrics 01

Holy Toledo, I'm ahead of schedule. Only for four days, but it has been so long since I was ahead of schedule on anything, I'm going to bask in it for a while.

Basking done. What am I doing and what have I accomplished? I took Todd Stone's "12-Week Novelist Boot Camp" plan out of Novelist's Boot Camp, and plugged it into my calender--only giving myself two weeks to complete each week. I just finished all the exercises for the first week. (And thanks for the earlier comment, Todd. :D)

Now the first week's work is on getting your mind set to write and focused brainstorming. So I'm not claiming to be a writing wiz with my progress, I've done a lot of brainstorming on this universe. And using the Big Rocks and daily MITs has helped me focus my energy on what needs to be done. This progress visible despite taking the weekend off and needing two days to recover from that.

So what do I have accomplished storywise?

• Comprehensive Concept
• Cast List
• Setting Notes

There are still plenty of background holes--a couple of character need names, for example--but there's enough down to get me started on the next section.

It takes a little of the happy buzz off to realize I have to be told what to do and when with writing. It's nothing I have never done before, so it's not learning new tricks. More like rewiring my brain to do this again, which still makes me ask "what the frell?" to myself. I don't know why my brain needs rewiring, but since I'm getting results, it must need rewiring. *Shrugs* Like I said, it's working so I'm not questioning much.

Comprehensive Concept: I know I have used this technique before though I'm fairly sure I used a whole paragraph. But shrinking it down to a sentence covering four essentials of the story is brilliant.

Strix: : In this paranormal suspense (genre), a vampire (main character) disguises himself as a superhero and then must protect a human woman (main character) from the murderers (opposition) trying to frame him for their killings in the upper classes of Haganville (macro setting).

Cast List: This was a great exercise, thinking about your inspirations, setting, and genre then listing the people you would run into. Normally, I just get a hold of the core cast and let them rip, and make up new people when the story reaches them. But this list creation and then picking opposites have inspired some dramatic scenes in my head at least. I'm not sure if those scenes will make the final cut, but they are new possibilities.

Setting Notes: These usually end up wrote all over the place. My notes on Zy's novel... *shudder* I love having them in one self-contained spot to add more to if I think of it.

Biker Mice From Mars: Evil Jack: For Worse 22

I finally got the second draft finished! I've got some peeved feelings about it. It should not take me so long to finish drafts. It makes me feel that I suck at time management.


Progress Bar from Writertopia

I only managed to cut 297 words when I was supposed to trim 2456, which means I added too much. I'm not beating myself up over it now. I'll let beta readers have their say and then cut again while correcting those edits. If I get any beta readers, everyone seems to be in hiding right now. Shmeg.

Now to finish the metrics.

"For Worse" Metrics 28 March 25, 2008

Character Pass
7. Are your character rehearsing or playing their parts? No.
8. Are the bit players stealing the show? Don't think so.
9. Is the point of view consistent? yes.

Objective Pass
Make the character matrix before starting this pass. I can only assume this stage will be less time consuming when you have all the pieces in place having created them during writing and brainstorming stages.

1. Are the objectives clearly visible in the beginning? Yeap.
2. Are the objectives clearly visible in each scene? Yes.
3. Are the characters taking actions to achieve those objectives? Yes.
4. Are objectives in conflict with each other? Yeap.
5. Can you track the progress as you go along? Yeap.
6. In what ways can you raise the stakes? Scene 31 - stretch out Throttle's dismayed time with what he thinks Charley's answer is.
7. Do the objectives get resolved in the end? Yes.

Dialogue Pass
Need to figure out how to spell MacCyber and spell it that way in all stories!

1. Are your characters using words as weapons? Tweaked a few, especially in the Scene 2.
2. Is dialogue only there to show something? No.
3. How could this dialogue more strongly reveal the characters? I think most of the tweaking fell here. Tweak Stoker and Carbine's dialogue for this.
4. How could the dialogue work harder? Figured out what was wrong, I had Carbine and Throttle referring to two different scripts. Better now, sounds like they had the same conversation.
5. Is the speaker's identity clear? I think so, but I've had this story in my head for a long time.
6. Does the dialogue contain beats to punctuate it? Not really sure what Stone means by this question, and also unwilling to mess up my natural ear for dialogue trying to find it.
7. Is there a better arrangement? Tweaked for this.
8. Does the dialogue fit? Yeap.
9. Does it feel real? I think so.

Biggest tweak was in the Stoker and Carbine scene.

Description and Narration Pass
1. What description can be cut?
2. Does the description do its job?
3. Does the description convey a mood?
4. How can more variety be introduced?
5. Is it part of the scene?
6. Is there a better arrangement?

"For Worse" Metrics 29 March 30, 2008

Here's where I addressed most of the narration problems I had thought of in earlier passes.

"For Worse" Metrics 30 April 1, 2008

Sending the word count on a diet. I'm working backwards through the scenes. Goal is to reduce by 10% meaning 2456 words have to go.

I ended up adding more description and combining two scenes into one.

"For Worse" Metrics 31 April 8, 2008

Narration Diet
Pass to cut out adverbs I missed on earlier passes.

Action Pass
I think the actions are fine.

"For Worse" Metrics 32 April 16, 2008

Logic Pass
Yes, I think everything flows together as it should for chronology, scene structure, and for the characters.

Miscellaneous Pass
There's only one technical detail I need to double check--how the black bike pops out cannons.

After watching the "Masked Motorcyclist" with a lot of fast-forward, I was ready to fix everything I had marked. Luckily, there was nothing to do on the paying job and I plowed through most of the manuscript there. I finished up at home.

"For Worse" Metrics 33 April 17, 2008

Bloody hell, I'm counting the disclaimer and my keeping track of the dates as part of the word count! Cut those out and do a recount.


Progress Bar from Writertopia

Okay, so I only need to find 2010 words to cut. That's progress.