Just throwing out ideas.

Dorian develops a nanotechnology that he can inject into his/her blood to give him/her eternal youth by cellular repair. With his/her body that can withstand all sorts of chemical abuse and disease he forsakes his/her significant other as he/she descends into more and more debauchery.

He starts to alienate his friends, sending tweets, facebook comments etc. while drunk or high, the social media comments get more vicious and nasty and everyone he knows starts to fall away. Then he starts to see subtle changes in all his pictures in his online presence, flickr, facebook, youtube, etc...

He decides to change his life thinking his sinful life is causing this to happen. But the hateful messages, and degrading pictures continue, his social media has taken a life of it's own. He can't get rid of the accounts, if he deletes them they reappear.

In the end he's lost all of his friends, everybody hates him, so he decides only giving up his eternal youth will stop it. He injects himself with something to counteract the nanotech, but it turns out it's also been spiked with poison. As he dies, his spouse/SO reveals he/she as been hacking all his accounts be he/she knows he always uses the same few passwords (all something vain), nothing supernatural has been happening at all. Maybe that's a little too simple, could also be an abandoned child or someone else with a ax to grind.

See, nanotechy stuff is SO not my forte. I'm all about the psychological implications and grounding it in (for me) a certain measure of reality. It's where my strengths lie so to try to veer too far from that, I'd be setting myself up for failure, I think.

TB, that's a hell of a crazy/lush story there- there are definitely some elements that I find intriguing and that have sort of sparked some offshoots in my twisted little brain.

Lizard brain is busy marinating, yes it is...

Well, the nanotech is just to get to eternal youth/beauty without something supernatural, not very important. More about the cloud of social media taking the place of the portrait.

Still like more goth in my Dorian. But if I were going to a "cloud Dorian" I think I'd take a mirror approach to you. Dorian is an ordinary schlub, gets a little money, establishes a permanent fund with an online PR firm to polish his on-line image. The alter his photos so that he wins all the "hot or not" contests, send out bots and paid personas to raise on-line money for charity. On-line he becomes more and more of a beautiful person. Meanwhile he suffers skin and muscle disease, looks less and less like his persona on-line. Eventually no one will believe he is the real person connected with his facebook page and the rest of his on-line persona, he loses his job, his bank account, becomes homeless, robbed of his wallet and all ID. Gets pushed out of all the good begging spots by other homeless people in better shape. Ends up shivering in a cardboard box in a dark alley, as the snow falls he probably won't make it through the night. While his on-line personal goes on and on from success to sucess, the permanent fund ensuring the PR firm will keep his cyber self alive forever, eternally growing more beautiful. The cyber self is the real Dorian, and the live (but not for long) Dorian the "portrait" that is finally discarded. About public image and celebrity rather than beauty. No relation to my last idea. I still like my last idea better for a novel, but I think "The Facebook Page of Dorian Gray" would not make a bad short story. You will note this Dorian, unlike Wilde's is not a bad person. Just get's eaten by his public image.

I'm not a bad macro plotter. Shame I can't micro plot.

That's an interesting idea.

I'm not sure I'm a good plotter on any level.

I think my synopsis is coming together, maybe.

Question for the class: I'm curious about how you guys rewrite once the story is done. I edit as I go, usually, and I'm finding it really difficult to see what needs fixing once a story is completed.

I edit as I go, too, Holli, so by the time a "first" draft is done, it's actually more like a fifth or sixth (or ninth or tenth... who's counting?) draft. And yeah, it's damned near impossible to have perspective after that. But I find two things help: one is asking for a few (as many as you require- for me it's only two or three) cold reads, strictly for plot/engagement of the reader and the other is simply to step back and not look at it for a week or so.

Definitely let it sit for a while, Holli -- you just won't see stuff until then because you're so familiar with it.

When I do go back and reread, I mark typos and small word changes as I go, even recast awkward sentences, but I also makes notes about what might be missing -- does something need some more seeding, is anything repetitive, etc. Then I go through and usually make larger, story-length changes like that one at a time, i.e. give more info about Jane Doe's grandmother in one pass, and in another pass scale back the appearance of Pointless Character X or whatever.

I work differently, but I'm doing non-fiction and also think I may need to revise my procedures, cause they take forever. I don't edit much as I go, cause if I do I never finish. I maybe look at a chapter once after I've finished and go on to the next. Then when everything is done I go through the whole thing a section at a time, repeatedly editing one section until I'm satisfied then moving on to the next. I finished a 92,000 word draft December 21. Still working on revisions. So not the speediest revision process in the world, and probably not something to emulate.

I do a lot of pre-plotting of stories, and I often find that if I'm looking ahead at a plot morass that I cannot continue even first draft writing until I've at least mapped the primary events. Which means that once that primary writing is done that I'm fairly content with plot, characters, etc. I do need to become more comfortable with letting stuff sit at least a few hours before posting it, because some verbal tics that get past in primary writing aren't as clear on a later read-through. I'm 90-95% happy with what I have at the end of primary writing, because I will edit as I go if the sentence I've just written doesn't feel right. I can't let things I know are wrong fester behind me, it's like a rock in my shoe.