625 words

[ellarien]

One and a half videophone conversations, mostly.

In other writing-related news, I've been rereading some of my old stuff again, and wondering what led me to certain choices in the rewriting phase. There's a minor character from The Admiral's Lady who didn't make it into the final version; I can more or less see why (I was trying to be ruthless about dropping unnecessary stuff, and her main scene just slowed the story down even though it was the only scene containing the title phrase), but the trouble is that she still exists in my head -- and turns up in some of the sequel stories too.

Comments

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

Sounds as if your best choice is to have her in a marginal role, but not give her centre stage. Alternatively, if her scene was important for other reasons, you might look at other places where your scenes establish something fairly minor - 'time passes and the characters get to know each other' is always a good place to start - and see whether you can replace them with other scenes - often wildly different scenes, involving different events and different characters which, ultimately, establish the same, so she gets _more_ of an arc, however minor it might be.

[ellarien]

That process sounds somewhat familiar -- it's more or less how the novel-thing gained several thousand words in the first round of 'cutting.'

The A.L is not really up for another rewrite, but the sequel may be, one of these days, and the bit where the minor character jokes with the heroine about something that (as of the third draft or so) didn't actually happen will probably have to go, alas.