The editing marathon continues apace

jaylake has an oddly appropriate entry about crutch words and how they can overwhelm the prose of a piece. As always: Jay knows his stuff when it comes to the business of writing.

Given that I'm currently line editing with a vengeance, I'm very aware of how sloppy prose of a piece can get on the first few drafts. I'm not even half way through line editing and I've already managed to cut out ten pages worth of crutch words and unnecessary phrases and other linguistic detritus. I have a love affair with the word "that", apparently. I think at least half of the 5,000 deleted words so far were that's.

Ugh. This is still easier than trying to hammer out a synopsis, and that's just sad.

I still have no idea if I have anything approaching the right kind of synopsis, and I think this is the most aggravating part of the entire thing. Even more aggravating than starting from scratch on a novel that I worked four years already on. At least then I knew what to do.

I have no idea how to handle a synopsis. I've tried writing and re-writing it several times. It always sounds like crap and there's only so much hair on my head that I can pull out before I'm bald.