Thursday Thoughts

My progress on my novels was somewhat derailed (happily) due to a request for a rewrite from a prestigious market. The edits to the story then proceeded to eat my head completely for close to twenty-four hours. I re-sent it yesterday morning and today got a notice it would be 3-4 weeks before he could see it. Augh the anticipation!

In any case, I am now in the last few "phases" of the Journal macro edits - time in the world is measured by the date within a moon-phase. I think my spreadsheet is very long - I won't be surprised if it is more than 30 pages. Being able to see what each scene consists of should allow me to go through and note where would be best to insert discussion of element X, element Y ... then I take a micro pass at the manuscript.

Then I rewrite from the manuscript in a clean document. Oh, this will take forever. I'm not even sure if I am over-editing, but I know that one of my weaknesses is that I don't edit enough, so putting myself through such a laborious process is a worthwhile experiment. It may work for me; it may not.

I'm concerned that Scylla and Charybdis is too "talky," but I've tried to keep the tension going. I guess the issue here is that I've never written a story whose purpose is so entirely to explore the setting, so I may not have a good feel for the balance. The worldbuilding seems to fit pretty naturally into the narration, but there's so much of it. I also realize that I need to be more intensive about Themiscyra, as knowing precisely where Anaea comes from is crucial to have a frame of reference for her later journeys.

I am also starting to feel like a bit of an imposter. I always knew there was some serious material with the gender dynamic - but my intentions had been to play that light, less a sociological treatise as an exploration not unakin to a child crawling through one of those Playspaces. Now I'm seeing other serious psychological questions and even a few religious ones, and I really don't feel as if I have any business commenting on these things. I never set out to have a "message" in my fiction, and I'm concerned that I sound like I'm preaching now. It's fiction, it's a story ... and yet I am so worried about what I might be saying, perhaps inadvertently, that I don't know what to do.

All this and I'm still in Chapter Two.