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.

Like Typo, I don't like to revise as I go since getting that first draft means I can get it done. Then I rewrite until it feels okay.

Bear in mind I've only written the one novel, and I don't have all that much external validation that it's any good.

I've got to decide on my next story. One is SciFi set on a tidally locked planet where a colony has dissolved. They are divided by a stormy and dangerous twilight zone on the edges of the day-side and night-side. The relatively primitive (they have it much rougher than the night-siders for various reasons) day-siders live in communal tribes with increasingly draconian rules as resources and shelter get more and more scare. The night-siders have more technology and more land. They have a coal-fired laissez-faire society where the very wealthy run everything. The story centers around a primitive day-sider ending up trapped on the night-side where she becomes a catalyst for change in a town owned by the owner of the coal mines the town mines.

The other possible story in epic/contemporary fantasy with our world sandwiched between a more spiritual realm and a more base realm (id, ego, superego, heaven and hell, etc...) and paranormal stuff is a result of the intersection of these realms, and they are places the soul may flow to after death. It follows the story of an agent from the spiritual realm being brought into our world (which makes him an angel of sorts), a very traumatic process. The people who are supposed to tell him his mission are dead, he has to discover his mission, deal with temptations of flesh, discover good and evil aren't the same as spirit realm and base realm, and his mission has some dramatic twists. I'll probably have ghosts, angels, demons, clockwork automatons with trapped souls, and vampire-ish creatures that are the basis for vampire legends.

Can't decide yet.

Gud, have you read Zelazny's Jack of Shadows? It's set on a day/night world.

Nope, never even heard of it.