Thursday Thoughts

Today would be free-write day, but I can't seem to get onto the forums ... and the lack of any messages to the effect of a reminder would suggest that it is down. Either way - I am a lump of allergies, so probably just as well.

Started to move through the manuscript of Journal of the Dead while trying to juggle the printed copy of my outline. Unwieldy thing! I am really concerned about the opening fight scene: it has to go bad and escalate fast enough for Rhiane to accidently stab someone before the rest of the guards get in from outside. As written, it doesn't work. My manuscript copy has a whole bunch of scrawled notes now on how to fix that. Certainly I can get away with Parik being short-tempered and preremptory, but there are limits.

Scylla and Charybdis is moving comfortably and ... going in a direction that was quite unplanned and didn't occur in the original story, though this is more an issue how I'm getting from point B to point C rather than a change in the positioning of the points. It's a summing of little changes I made that seemed to fit better as I got into more detail about the world and how Anaea got in this position.

I've recently been reading a riveting book called Dragonhaven by Robin McKinley (which, unless the last half utterly disappoints, will be going on my recommended reads). Its micro focus on emotions, reactions and coping with the unthinkable has made me think a lot more about these early parts of SaC, when Anaea is wrestling with her version of the impossible. I can't go into the same amount of detail as Dragonhaven - the scope of the story makes that impossible unless I want enough pages to comprise War and Peace. But it has given me some sense of just how much you can get away with ...