The rewrite on Badlands Cursed is done and I’m moving into the editing phase, or as I think of it, hunting the Wumpus.
For those of you not fortunate enough to have grown up with text-based games, Hunt the Wumpus was a game where you had to navigate a series of dark rooms and find the dreaded Wumpus without blundering into the same room as the monster and getting eaten. There were other obstacles like bats that would transport you to random rooms and other rooms with deadly pits. Your only weapons were a crooked arrow that you could direct through rooms and your wits to decipher the hints the game would give you like “You feel a draft nearby” indicating a pitfall.
In the same way editing feels like that to me, navigating in the dark and trying to reconcile the ideal story in my head with what I actually wrote on the screen, knowing it’s filled with Wumpuses great and small, pitfalls, and bats. If I fail though, it’s the reader that will fall into a plot hole pit, get lost when the lost-continuity bats suddenly take them somewhere else in the story, or get eaten by the dreaded exposition and immersion Wumpuses (Wumpai?) It’s a challenge and a slog, but it’s a necessary part of the process.
Have you ever come across a Wumpus a your reading? How about in a movie? Let me know in the comments!
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