Time Out of Joint

So what have Becky and yours truly been doing since we posted that opening entry in the RADFAam Roundabout? We finished a new draft of the work at the end of the year, sent it off to our interested publisher and waited for feedback. Among the chores involved in revising this work was the daunting task of smiting all the story’s anachronisms. Because the time we spent writing in serialized format was so much longer than the story’s actual timeline, more than a few goofs snuck in.

We had, for instance, two characters going to a movie showing of Titanic eight months before the flick was actually released. In the book’s centerpiece speech (perhaps the most overtly didactic sequence in the entire work), we had our speaker referring to events that hadn’t yet happened: like Camryn Manheim’s “This is for all the fat girls!” moment at the Emmy awards. (We also, in the same chapter, have a character praising several celebrities for taking fat positive stances that they have since reneged on. We discussed whether we wanted to keep these celebs’ names in and decided that we wanted to remember ‘em when they weren’t fat-bashing victims of the fame machine.) Did we catch all the anachronisms? Probably not, but we made a good effort.

Another revision we worked on at the suggestion of our interested publisher was the pruning of bolds and italics that we’d inserted into the original online version. We had no issue with this suggestion. Our primary reason for being so profligate with the big bolds and italics was to make the blocks of text more readable on a monitor. On paper, though, it all became excessive, so we were pretty merciless in cutting them out.

Writing the work on a piecemeal basis, it was probably inevitable that we’d include a few plot threads that didn’t really go anywhere. Going through the full manuscript now, we tried to snip a few of these from our sprawling storyline. In a few cases, we’d look an abandoned plotline and go, “Why didn’t we do anything with that?” But, more often, our reaction on revisiting ‘em was, “Man, we dodged a bullet there!”

Took some time just to get all these basic housecleaning chores completed on a 150,000-plus word manuscript, but we finally did it. Next up: a major rewrite of the abovementioned speech chapter – which we’ll talk about another time . . .

WELCOME

to the RADFam Roundabout, our bloggish diary of the transformation of our long-running cyber-serial, “Measure By Measure,” into a printed novel. Originally begun in 1997, “Measure” grew into a one-hundred chapter serial on the Dimensions On-Line website. Both of us had previously written for the print version of Dimensions: Becky with a set of romantic short stories; Bill with a series of essays on fatness in pop culture as well as with some pseudonymous short stories. This was our first written collaboration, however, and we had a blast doing it.
The online serial had a coterie of devoted readers, though two site crashes kept us from ever getting an accurate estimate of their number, and it concluded on January 2, 2005, with a epilogue featuring the marriage of two of the serial’s characters. Initially, we attempted to produce new chapters on a bi-weekly basis, but by the end they were being written monthly. Still, many of our readers stuck with us, which helped to keep us committed to the project.

The cyber-soap (for a short period, we even had an ad on the pages for a self-made line of soap bars) sat for two years before we decided to do anything to it. Finally last summer, while attending a size-acceptance convention in the Chicagoland area, we had the opportunity to briefly corner Fat!So? writer and editor Marilyn Wann to ask her advice about getting “Measure” into book form. She gave us the name of a possible publisher, who we contacted after we’d returned from the Con. We directed her to the online version of our story, which was still up at the time, and, after reading the opening chapters, she quickly pronounced herself hooked. Since then, we’ve been working on revising and revamping the material for book format, a process that was interrupted for a time by a move across country, and as the New Year approaches, we’ve gotten close to re-“Measuring” our work.

Over the next few months, then, we plan to discuss both the story’s genesis and its revision process – and chart our manuscript’s progress into what’ll hopefully become a thick ol’ volume full of story. We also have plans for a follow-up to our romantic epic and as soon as we get these firmed up, we’ll hopefully preview ‘em here. So stay tuned . . .