To be fair, it's more of a case of tag. He never seems to catch me when I'm actually home. Then when I try to catch him back he's at work or something. On the rare occasion we can actually connect it's great. For instance, he recently let me know that he's up to about eleven pages of his script. So yay for him!
Honestly, we're just reconnecting as friends. We haven't really spoken much about PLME, but he HAS gotten back in to Devon writing! See, there's a bit of a loophole in how Devon left the board's story. So now he's doing this cool side-story with Hubby about Devon having amnesia.
When the loophole was discovered Hubby decided to come up with a BUNCH of options for Devon's grand return. After a randomized dice roll to narrow it down to three options, Ron got to decide which one he wanted to write. Hubby decided this was the best option, because if he just picked a story line for Ron, he may not be inspired to write it. Which means he'd stay off the forum, and that defeated the whole point.
Anyway, Hubby and I feel good old Ron chose wrong. One of the final three options was that Devon woke up with no memory of who he was. He somehow morphed in to a dog before collapsing, and so when he awakes he thinks he's a sentient dog who can breathe fire. I'm not gonna lie. I'm a bit disappointed he didn't choose that.
Nope. Instead, Ron chose the "Devon only knows his name, that he's a mutant, and that he's out for Trish's blood - although he doesn't remember who Trish actually IS" route. Still fun. He and Hubby spent the late morning/early afternoon yesterday getting started on that story. Which is fantastic because that means Ron is back on the boards; back to writing as Devon. Which also means Ron is just back to writing; period. So, yay again for him!
Now, back to what I started with: me working on PLME. As I mentioned in my last post, I found a bit of a snag where Willow's tone about the whole Devon situation seemed to have taking a weird turn; completely ignoring the argument she had in the opening scene with Devon in his cell. On the one hand, we could cut that opening scene and ignore the plot hole it created. But we both loved the scene so much, and, frankly, it's one of the few scenes left that still remains from Ron's original version of the story.
So part of my week was trying to bring everything full circle again. Get the story back to the part it's at now, but without ignoring Willow's original argument. I had a spark of inspiration last week while at work, and I wrote out this whole monologue for Devon. Ron says he has some tweaks to make it sound more "Devon-like". I can dig that, especially since I'm only collaborating with him on this story because I said the same thing about needing things to sound more "Willow-like".
While that part is on the back burner I realized that I really don't want to lose the story we already have. It has some really good stuff in there, even if it's not entirely accurate any longer. I figured the best way to solve that issue is to create a copy document. I would keep the current PLME file as is; for posterity - so to speak. Then I would change the 3rd quarter of the copy to the publishable version of PLME.
I then realized that it would bring me up to like five copies of the same document, more or less. I knew I needed to weed some of it out. So I spent the past three days or so with the current PLME document open side by side with the other versions. I went word for word through each document. Any place where I saw a difference I either kept whichever version I liked better, or I would make a note of the difference in a comment that Ron could weigh in on. It was tiring work, but it went fairly quickly with my personal version of the document. Originally, this was a copy of Ron's version, but with the grammatical errors and typos fixed. I also started rewording a few things. Eventually I just started up the current PLME document so we finally had a joint Word Doc that we both could edit. Anyway, since it was my personal document, there weren't too many things different between the two - aside from edits that Ron and I already agreed upon.
The tricky one was going through Ron's original version. I couldn't edit it - which is why I made my version - and so I had a LOT of notes attached to it. Not only did I have to have his version and the current version side-by-side to compare the two, but whenever I got to a notation I had to read it over and decide if it was still a valid concern. Those that I feel we still needed to discuss/decide on I transferred over. With any luck, enough was added to the current PLME file that Ron won't need his version any longer as well.
To be fair, I haven't COMPLETELY finished transferring his version to ours. I still have some bits and pieces of Willow's POV part at the tail end, but I'm super close to finishing.
Once I'm done, I get the fun of working more on the rewrite! Perhaps Ron writing Devon again will re-inspire him to finish up his side of the rewrite. While I'm waiting on his end, I get to make sure all the head hops are weeded out.
Man, I'm so excited about the progress we're making.
I just wish I didn't slack off on my reading or chapter/story posting in the process. I hope the finished product of PLME will be good enough to justify the trade.
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