Thursday Thoughts

Progress on the synopsis continues. My goal is to get it down to five single-spaced pages (yes. *Down* to. Now you see what I am dealing with, here) and given the complexity of the storyline, I may call it good there. For now, I am going to put it aside and try for the one page / five paragraph version. I'll come back to it. That's a threat, synopsis. Cower in fear. Or at least stop being so difficult.

I can see the end in sight with my story for Gypsy Shadow's prompt. My main concern is that I have taken the age of the protagonist too far. Looking at the picture, I see a young person - a teen or a child - not a fully grown woman ... but I have made the reflected character too young to match. We'll see.

What's been interesting with this one is at the same time, I'm reading a book about dialogue ("Writing Dialogue" by Tom Chiarella, for the curious) and it's influenced the way I've written. One of Chiarella's main points is that, though it should always be shaped in service of the story, real dialogue is messy: people interrupt each other, speak in shorthand, don't answer the questions actually asked, don't listen to each other ... thinking about this has allowed me to create (I think!) subtler dialogues among the more "civilized" characters, to contrast with the subject of the image, who is very direct.

On vacation for a week now, so not sure when I'll finish. It's gonna be close.

I hope August 31st means "before midnight on the 31st." ;-)