Catching Up and Editing

I'm almost caught up from my short vacation. Good grief! I can't imagine how horrific catching up would be if I had a real vacation of a week or more. In just five-and-a-half days I had more than 1000 emails, etc to take care of. But I'm finally almost caught up with those. I am doing a serious edit of my LOTR Community story. I have come to the conclusion that I am a rather rough first draft writer. What I write is not unreadable, no, but it needs serious editing to bring all of the stream of consciousness junk into better order, eliminate the duplicate words and repetitions, and catch stupid errors that would totally sink a story. I am a heavy-handed editor, though. I delete whole paragraphs, move things around mercilessly, and in this particular story, I changed the POV completely and am much happier with the story as a result. I wanted to get a fair amount done last night, but this kind of editing comes slowly so I will have to continue working on it tonight.

The story has a stream with fish....

My story mentions a waterfall, so I thought a couple of nice waterfall or stream pictures might be restful for today. My day started at 3am today so that I could catch up and I'll be exhausted by tonight, but I have Master Chef to watch (at least to listen to) and I need to get my own work out of the way so that I can beta for my friend's next chapter.

At the end of the valley is a waterfall. The characters don't get to see it from this perspective, 

only from the top, but this was such a pretty picture.

So...stream of consciousness is allowable in my blog. I jump around, flit from point to point, decide to push in X, Y or Z. All permissible. But not in a story that will be posted for reading. No, no and again...no. That's why I've been working on my technique with my Creative Writing course. What amuses me is that the information and suggestions are identical in many aspects to Man, Oh Man by Josh Lanyon which has been my reading materials for several days. I've been working my NookColor's highlighting feature to death in this book. I must have well over 100 parts highlighted. Such a valuable book for me, and it dovetails so nicely with my more standard coursework that I've been laughing with every new chapter. More tomorrow!