Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

Time’s up!

Our “Handwritten MS” Contest is complete. And the winner is…

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I finished the rewrite of “Cast in Stone,” today. It’s longer and, in my opinion, much improved. I’m going to give it another read-through before posting it, but I’m pretty happy with it.

As a reminder, I’m giving away the original story, the hand-written rewrite, and now I’m adding the marked-up printout that I created during this rewrite process. To enter this contest, go to the original contest post and leave a comment (full rules after the jump).

Rewrites are always instructive, if you approach it with the right attitude. Problems I thought were insurmountable (albeit 20 years ago) I now find correctable.

• The “new character halfway through the story” issue was solved by bringing all three characters into the first scene.
• The “too-short scene near the end” issue was fixed by combining it with the following scene.
• The “too many POVs” issue I addressed by pulling the entire story up into full omniscient viewpoint.

But why rewrite the whole story, every word of it? Well, my style has changed a lot in 20 years, and I want it to sound like me, now, and not me, then.

Keep your eyes peeled.

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Tonight, as I was working on the rewrite of “Cast in Stone,” I thought it might be a lark to offer up my handwritten MS to anyone who wants it.

Full disclosure: If no one puts in for it, I’ll pout a wee bit.

And so…

If you want to receive in the post a printout of the original version of “Cast in Stone” (with colorized markup, as posted here on this blog) accompanied by my handwritten rewrite (I’m rewriting the entire story, not just sections, on Rhodia paper with a St Dupont pen using Noodler’s Baystate Blue ink), all you have to do is this: (more…)

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