Saturday, September 29, 2012

Ah, revising novels...

It turned out I had considered re-writing Higher Ground briefly last year, to the tone of about 8 pages of notes on characters and the setting. Which apparently had involved changing the names of all the characters, a truly ridiculous amount of detail for the setting. Seriously, brain: what possibly use could notes on the education system of the Kingdom possibly have for a novel involving 2 brothers ending up on another world? And, alas, all the setting and character notes tossed out the baby with the bathwater, as it were.

I believe I was attempting a clean start to the novel by altering even the relationship between the brothers but one reader who had liked the first version intimated, half of why the novel worked was because of the idea of the younger brother rescuing the older. So I'm basically deleting all that as useless and building notes from the original idea, though I think I will not even attempt to include some things that didn't make even the original version of the story.

For example, I had notes on a 'species' called the Krisk, as follows:
"Krisk: What the coat hanger people call themselves, or perhaps the sound they make when parts of their body rub together. Their language is very hard for others to understand and since most people who meet them are more concerned with not being shredded and hung on various hangers little is known about them at all except that they’re very scary. "

... so, yeah, somehow I never did use that at all in the 2004 version. And won't in any other, for some reason.

2 comments:

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    1. I *think* what was going through my head was that faerie was going to be a place lost things ended up: including coat hangers and socks. From there, the coat hangers having their own civilization as essentially evil scare crows somehow made a kind of sense.

      A very limited kind, as I never did include them and likely never shall :)

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