I’m busy working through the final cuts and slashes on a manuscript before I hunker down and begin the editing phase that brings it author final.  One of the interesting things about this process is the objectivity I get about the story flow.  I can see where this part needs to be put earlier, and this part needs to be dumped, while this needs to be stretched out and snipped into several scenes, going in here, then here and here, to heighten revelation just enough to drive my reader nuts.  It’s a fun process, but it also sometimes gets my eyes to crossing and my brain in a whirl of confusion about “where I am in the process,” especially in the electronic medium I now use to write.

Used to be, long time passing, that I wrote everything out in hard copy, typing on a big Olympia manual, the kind used by newspaper journalists.  Back then, this phase of novel creation was easier to manage because it was a very hands-on operation.  While, today, on computers, the process is simpler and tidier in that I can just highlight, cut and paste, it’s much more problematic for me to keep in my head.  Visual aids of snips and bits of paper pasted or taped to full blank sheets and inserted appropriately into the draft copy where it needed to go was a whole lot easier for me to keep organized in my head. 

Still, the whole cut and slash process still provides this author with an entertaining, dare I say “fun,” game of splicing, dicing, and rearranging things so that, when all is said and done, the book is beginning to take on its final potency and provocatively addictive qualities. The story begins to hone itself to a blade’s edge of riveting.  Now there’s the reward for me.

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