The name of this blog has origins that predate it, and I’m not just talking about my previous blogger account. When I was in college, I wrote a novel called RONIN ON EMPTY. It ran about 100,000 words long. It was epic, to say the least. And way too long for a first-time novelist in terms of actually convincing someone that it should be published.

When I was working on my Master’s degree, I refined it into what I thought was the final version — about 89,00 words. I eventually printed the whole thing out and bound it (like a course reader) so I’d have a copy for myself. Since December, I’ve seriously gone back and tried to edit it, less a revision than a trimming of the fat. There was a lot of dated stuff, and some errors, which I attempted to fix. I even composited two major characters into one to streamline the story.

Anyway, I’ve trimmed the fat to 79,000 words and realigned the plot’s spinal column so that it makes more sense, narratively-speaking. Whether I’ll have time to build up the novel’s muscles, I’m not sure. But at least I have a “cleaner” version to work with the next time I pick it up.

In the mean time, I think I’m going to use the name for this blog, and on the creative side of things, work on some more short stories, and see how that goes.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 6th, 2009 at 8:40 am and is filed under Ronin on Empty. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.