Cutting room floor

My beta reader had concerns about pacing and I agreed. I do tend to write fat and then trim. One big reason is I let Penny babble. Both of us love to analogize, and when I do her narration as a stream of consciousness a whole bunch of "this reminds me of" gets in there.

For the pop culture references, I had a plan. I was going to start with her going to that well too much, then have the solitude of the desert quiet that internal monologue until she didn't need it so much. That...didn't happen. So in the last two or three edit passes I've been throwing a lot of it out. I'd trimmed a quarter before the beta reader got there. That was her note as well, and with new confidence, I took out over 2/3 of the remainder.

The "heroes" scene, for instance. That one is all about a bully at a retro diner that drags Penny into thinking and reacting like she's in an '80s movie, and consciously having to move off that.

What survived the last cuts? Flashdance. And that was just in the opening. The whole confrontation and resolution is down to...none.

Similarly, for the whole sequence from the diner to the end of Part III, Penny is complaining that everything is reminding her of a movie, from the Escape from New York street scene of Albuquerque's "War Zone" to the Damnation Alley of entering the Atlas-F missile silo. But my choice in the revisions was to let the reader pick the movies or visuals. I might have hinted in a place or two (she thinks about giant scorpions while she is exploring the illegal radioactive waste dump) but it is stronger if the reader makes the connections.

Besides pop culture, Penny does the history/anthropology thing. The "monkey dance" squeaked through. Most of agriculture went away. The Face of Agamemnon stayed, barely. From things that weren't her: Pueblo language groups and Permissive Action Links went poof. Much of MAD went away and, sigh, the knife in the briefcase never made it in. Ham narrowly missed getting memorialized; the Challenger Memorial (roughly thirty feet away) was less distracting to the flow of the narrative.

Somehow, the Daisy Track, Colonel Stapp, the refrigerator and all managed to stay. 

Another big cut was that almost 2/3rds of Penny's "Now lets go over the facts of the case" stuff went away. In the final chapters, everyone but the White Sands girl, the Juan de Onate, and Lozen got cut -- even Joan Hinton, her words moving to "Ginny." And almost all of the explicit discussions of theme went, stripped down to one thin paragraph in the last scene.

Some of them my beta reader complained about, and my feeling is now that this is a bit like describing emotions. Don't feel the emotions for the reader. Let them take those emotions from what has happened. And by analogy, let them make the connections, understand why a character acted a certain way.

Anyhow.

I extended the WIPP sneak-in with a longer sequence of stuff. I couldn't quite get her into the mine itself, but how I staged it let me at least mention the Salt Hoist and the Salt Room and the Transition Line (yeah, there's a lot of salt involved). The climb out of the missile silo is also longer and harder, but mostly different; she's doing it with a hurt shoulder now.

With all of that, I'm still at 73,000 words. Hell of a lot of work for a book that's shorter than today's publishing norms...

Half way through running ProWritingAid across the revised manuscript. And, what have they done to my boy? ProWritingAid is sucking in new and surprising ways. I have decided, for instance, that it has no idea and no ability to understand when a semicolon or a full colon is better, and so is programmed to alert on all colons and wait for the user to do something about them.

In the early iterations it (like most grammar checkers) couldn't figure out dialogue punctuation. Now it has over-corrected. If I write; "I have finished." Tom closed the book and stood up? Well, PWA will flag that first period. "This should be "I have finished," it tells me. Because Tom can't possibly be doing an action that follows a closing punctuation; he can only be there to be followed by "...said."

(Or would that be, "...concluded?")

The death loop is back with a vengeance. And not just for clauses; now it will argue with itself over tenses. Wrong word use "sent." Wrong word use "send." Wrong word use "sent." Wrong word...

And stuff so blindingly weirdly wrong. We're talking Grammarly level wackiness. I need to go back to their site and make sure they haven't changed how they use AI again. And find out how to switch off the increasingly aggressive "We can rewrite this sentence for you, just press the AI button..."

Or maybe it is time to dump that subscription. In any case, I need a human editor. Spend thirty minutes fixing capitalization of "colonel" until I realized I had done most of them wrong and put them back again. I hate capitalization. And hyphens.

It saddens me that software can't be relied on to capitalize "Sir" correctly, put a comma after dialogue followed by "said," or determine if it should be "desk top," "desk-top," or "desktop." Because these seem to be simple things.

Where I would want a human editor is with ungrammatical speech, especially when it is conscious, mixed, and rapidly changing formality levels. Half my cast are archaeological field techs, which means they switch from precise and technical to slangy and casual at the drop of a trowel. Penny more and more admits to doing a sort of Valley Girl act to put others off guard. And that's before you get to Jackson and Sanchez, who speak distilled 1980's Army.

And tense, because story-telling tense is peculiar. One of the ways of achieving the effect of events happening as they are narrated is for the free indirect speech to be in present tense. I am tempted to say that tense in a mystery is almost as bad as tense in a time-travel story; "Now I knew that I wouldn't have given Richard the locket then because all the while I had been searching the mansion I had thought it was there, and not, as I knew now, on the boat -- or at least I hoped it would be when I'd finished searching there tomorrow."