Progress report and pet peeve randomocity

I'm almost through the first rewrite of The Sorcerer's Daughter.


What I'm doing at this point is changing the stuff I changed my mind about during the first draft, correcting typos, tweaking a few places where I thought the language was awkward or unclear, that sort of thing. I need to insert a scene, too, which I will do in the next couple of days, as soon as I find a good spot for it. The new scene would resolve an issue that keeps bugging me. Basically, it takes care of an issue that is always lurking in the background, and really needs to be cleared up.


What do I plan to do after that? Read it again, this time looking for issues with pacing, plot, story-telling . . . I won't actually make any changes during that pass, just focusing on how it reads. Pacing, mostly, is what concerns me. Nothing makes a story seem more amateurish to me than a story where the pacing is not considered and the story seems hurried, or seems to be really slow. It should have a faster tempo in some places, a slower one in others, a medium tempo in others. Like a piece of music.


This something that seems to be a lost art to many of today's writers, and it drives me nuts. I suspect a lot of novels get rushed into publication so what you actually read isn't what would be considered a final draft a few years ago--the writer would have been asked to make another couple of passes through the manuscript in the days before everyone got to be in such a hurry to have something published.


So, that's where I am with that.


As for the pet peeve, it involves lazy writing, especially on TV shows, and in crime dramas in particular.


It goes like this: "The victim was stabbed. Angle of the wound suggests the suspect is left-handed." So, we spend the rest of the show looking at who among the suspect pool is left-handed. Finally, we see someone writing something and see that he or she is using---dum dum dummmmm . . . his or her left hand! Gotcha!


Here's my problem. I write left-handed. If I ever stabbed somebody, it'd probably be with my left hand. I also fire rifles and shotguns left-handed.


However, I play guitar, golf, and tennis right handed. I bat right-handed. I throw with my right hand. My right hand is my shooting hand when I play basketball--though, oddly enough, I score more baskets when I use my left-hand, though that feels awkward to me. But I suck at basketball, just like I do most sports.


I had a friend who threw a baseball with his right hand and a football with his left. My dad was right-handed with almost everything, except golf.


What I'm saying is, just because you write with your left hand, doesn't mean you do everything with your left hand. There is a distinct possibility that someone who is inclined to stab people would write with his or her right hand and prefer to use the left for stabbing folks. Or, maybe he or she deliberately used the left hand to throw idiot television detectives off the trail.


It's just lazy writing. It's a quick way to resolve a story without having to work too hard at it.


Drives me nuts.