HYPERTEXT: A Bottle of Beer – Editing III
Learned much from a workshop on this last night (more on that later here or at CW) but one thing that came of it that I had forgotten was that in editing, sometimes something vital is lost. Overly ambitious and anxious to please, I slashed and mashed with glee. In the hypertext format there is much already left out as it is easy to leave the transitioning up to the difference in textboxes once a pattern has been established.
In cutting out unnecessary words, sentences, actions, etc., I ended up with a lexia that brought in a new character and waited a sentence before it was made clear who she was. However, in also leaving out the name of "Herve" because that sentence had been eliminated and the next reference to him was simply "he," –which became the starting point for him–it became unclear who we were talking about.
Another thing I realized as over 20% of the story fell into the black hole of the cosmos, was I ended up with a lot of "she" sentences that had likely been filled in with name or with fluff to separate the "shes" so they weren’t all clustered together and obvious. That’s a bit harder to fix, usually necessitating deeper cutting and making choices between which things "she" did as to what would stay, what would be deleted.
Still more to do on this to get it into a "more orderly" and "polished" form as was suggested.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology