TALES FROM THE REWRITE, by Mollie Hunt, Cat Writer

Last week when I was at the beach, I worked on reading (aloud) the proof copy of Cat Winter, one of my latest WIPs and the 2^nd book of the Cat Seasons Tetralogy. The manuscript has been through several edits, a beta reader, and a trip to my editor, so I went into it thinking, with a few tweaks here and there, the book would be ready to publish. The first pages came off without a hitch; then the red lines began. The way I proof is to mark directly in the proof book with a red pen—soon there were more pages with red lines, circles, and arrows that not.

Okay, that's pretty normal—for both Cat Café and Cosmic Cat, I slogged through two full proofs before I was happy. But then I ran into a bigger conundrum: you see, Cat Winter, like all the Cat Seasons Tetralogy, is in two parts. The first part is relatively tame violence-wise, but part two, when my heroes travel back in time to antediluvian South America, things begin to get ugly. I suppose like many of us, I had been traumatized at a young age by stories of atrocities committed by people of that era. I'm not sure if it was a catharsis to write about such horrors, but none the less, I got down and dirty. That would be fine since this isn’t by any means a “cozy” story, except that part 1 of the book flows in a completely different vein. The ultra-violence doesn’t fit. I need to tone it down. This means a huge rewrite. Not what I had planned.

How much violence do you tolerate in your fiction? How much do you enjoy? Where does violence fit into your taste in books? 

With the pandemic, as well as the Black Lives Matter protests, our penchant for reading violent stories is changing. We no longer want to hear about the rogue cop who does it all his way, no matter what laws he breaks or who gets hurt. But we don’t want a tiptoe through the tulips either. 

Cat Winter, being a sci-fantasy about cats saving the world, doesn’t have any cops, but it’s not all tulips either. Rewriting is hard, sometimes harder than the original draft; still, it’s the right thing to do. Be warned, however, I won’t be throwing out all the carnage. It’s way too much fun! 

Note: Cat Summer, the first book in the Cat Seasons Tetralogy, published by Fire Star Press last year, just won the Cat Writers’ Association Muse Medallion for best sci-fi/fantasy book 2019! This prestigious award is an exciting badge of honor for my debut sci-fantasy.

I Just Cannot

Editors are wonderful people. Well, the ones I have worked with are. ;-) For a writer, it’s hard to trust our babies—er, our stories—to someone else. But a good editor is a necessity, they help us polish our stories and make them shine. The refining process isn’t always easy—when your favorite line in the whole book doesn’t move the story forward, it needs to be cut. I’ve had this happen more than once and it never gets easier. But, a good editor can point out our errors and recommend changes without changing our unique voice and without making us feel like we should set our laptops on fire and move to an island with no writing implements and no internet connectivity.

I’m sure that each author has certain words and phrases that they overuse and I’m gradually getting a handle on mine. Therefore, before I send a story to my editor I search my document for all occurrences of the words that, very, really, and anything else that ends in ly and make changes as needed. I also do one last read-through of the entire manuscript in order to catch any phrases that I may have overused. 

Cricket is quite the feline editor.

 

However, there is one habit that I simply cannot seem to break. I love writing dialogue but, for some unknown reason, when I do, I stop using contractions. It’s very easy for me to start sounding like Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation. For those of you who aren’t Star Trek nerds, Data was an android who wanted nothing more than to be human. (Think Pinocchio in space.) Although he is far more human than he thinks, one of the things that makes Data different is that he doesn’t use contractions when he speaks. I would be awesome at writing his dialogue, LOL.

I use contractions in my every day speech, so I’m not sure why I tend not to when I write. When making revisions prior to sending my story to my editor I go through my dialogue and find as many contractions—or lack of contractions—as I can. However, whenever I get my feedback from the editor, there are always many instances that I didn’t catch. I don’t know if this is something that I’m always going to struggle with or if I’ll get better (hopefully the latter). After all, I just can’t is much catchier than I just cannot isn’t it?

As a matter of fact, in reading through this post, I found a few places where I could have used contractions but didn’t. I left them as evidence of my Contraction Dysfunction.

If you’re an author, what is your writing Achilles heel?

Until next month, happy reading!

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