Productivity?

Last November, as avid readers will know, I won NaNoWriMo. It was my intention, however, to have at the manuscript throughout December and do great and wonderful things to it, before unveiling it on an unsuspecting world. Avid readers will know this has not happened. This is in part due to my taking of a break after completing the 50,000 words "to give myself distance" before I started working on the edit. Heck of a lot of distance, I had.

The project will involve me taking the manuscript and cutting it up into 102 pieces. I'd hoped, though this may prove impossible for me, that each piece would be a stand-alone section. I have several extended bits of narrative that may prove impossible to fiddle with enough to fit, though I am willing to try, and the process of actually taking these bits of story and reducing and restructuring them will hopefully be An Interesting Learning Experience.

It's also an opportunity to get in and rejig the various bits that are terribly terribly wrong with the story. I have an underpopulated Britain courtesy of an economic collapse and a state-scale embrace of mumbo-jumbo. All well and good, but I go on about how well-maintained (at least superficially) everything is, when really it ought to be a bit more rundown. I've fudged a couple of important plot elements too; they're there, but covered in a line or two as though patching over holes in the plot using brevity. Hem hem. I also have some lovely but totally bizarre behaviour going on in the ending which really ought to come somewhere before the ending. And as for the ending itself, I still haven't got anything really satisfying. We shall see.

But most of this work has been put on hold because of Half Life 2. I just need to get to the end of episode 2 and I'll be fine. I promise.