Thursday Thoughts

Today is also the goal-setting day for a group I'm part of, and I came to an interesting realization: the only time I've missed or fallen shy of a goal was when I made a conscious decision to switch my focus for something more important. (Or my computer crashed with the latest edit of the story I was trying to post on it. Le sigh.) This week it was a requested revision from a top-tier market. I'm still not totally sure that I managed to work enough in-depth changes to satisfy the request, but I reached the point where I didn't want to do more because it might cause problems in another direction. So - you make a judgement call.

I ran into a small plot issue with Journal of the Dead which I resolved by re-casting some of a scene and putting in another time break. My next chunk involves two fairly involved dialogue insertions / revisions.

I notice that I have some tense jumps in Journal, which I've decided to leave. Because it is a journal, there are patches where the narrator would naturally discuss thoughts / confusions in a more immediate fashion. I've kept these to specific, distinct chunks and not allowed there to be hops when there's story going on. That should minimize the confusion and make the tense shifts feel natural rather than in error.

I ran into an odd issue with Scylla and Charybdis: so far, Anaea and Gwydion have solved all their problems by spinning falsehoods. Now, honestly, this is pretty much the only resource they have available to them, but it still becomes a little repetitive. I've taken conscious effort to re-cast the other two encounters in this part of the story so they are more direct and face-value. (This also fits the theme of the society they're moving through.)

I remain oddly amused that this particular segment of the novel had me googling "Jewish entrance scrolls" because I couldn't remember the word mezuzah for the life of me, and I stupidly didn't write the term down. I hope Anaea's religious cynicism isn't off-putting, but I have to keep in mind as I'm working how foreign all this is to her. She's sort of an untrained anthropologist.