Thursday Thoughts

... and this week, I have a cold. I have felt pretty oppressively miserable all day. Now I just have a stomachache.

I have reached and passed the halfway point with my macro editing pass for Journal of the Dead. One thing I have learned from doing this is that I can't rely on my mental sense of when events occurred in the storyline. I was very surprised to discover what had happened by or at the halfway mark. I'd introduced Atsihl - Rhiane's airheaded society friend - and Razentis - the foreign ambassador - had the first romance dream sequence, and initiated the deal-with-the-Devil (figuratively speaking) that drives the rest of the plot.

I'm beginning to be concerned how I can incorporate the notes I'm making into the edits. Right now, the only solution seems to be to read *all* of my correction notes before I mark up each scene. Tedious, but - hey, it may go faster as I inadvertently start memorizing the whole kit-and-kaboodle. Certainly the whole thing is so unwieldy that just finding what should go where is an undertaking.

Scylla and Charybdis continues to move slowly. I'm concerned it's too slow: I'm about 2500 words in, and the main tension has come from the initial mystery ... but seeing as it questions everything the main character knows about her world and introduces a character who is going to be her traveling companion through most of the book - I think I can justify it.

The short story covered this same period in about half the word count. I think I can account for most of the slower pace, though. I lengthened the dialogue with Gwydion somewhat and described both him and Anaea in more detail. As I looked back at the original story, I don't describe my MC at all, and for a novel-length work, that doesn't sit right with me as a writer. There are more descriptions of the surroundings, which honestly was just a bad omission in the original - but still brief. The backstory is slightly more expansive. Her conversation with Orithia is slightly longer, etc ... it adds up.

... plus, it's a novel, darnit. When I initially considered this idea, I estimated the 6700 word short story would be about the first 20,000 words of the novel. Now I'm thinking that's more likely to be the first 5000 words of the story will be the first 20,000 words of the novel. So I'm actually "ahead of schedule" - which is good, because I think there are more events that need to happen before the novel departs its home base, geographically speaking.