Thursday Thoughts

I finished "Scenting Rain" today - thanks to everyone who contributed a sentence for its sprawling expanse! It finished at a whopping 17,000 (and some change) words. I am more copacetic than I would have expected about being saddled with a bear-to-sell novella. Of course, it will probably shrink 2k or so in the editing, but still no chance of getting it under the 10k mark. I'd have to go through and delete random words.

One of the interesting elements to the story, for me, is an ordinary one: Gerune's not too bright. She means well and she tries hard, but she tends to miss nuances and alternate explanations. She is so fixed on things happening a certain way that she doesn't see different paths. Hopefully, I've made this human and realistic rather than irritating, but I don't think you necessarily see stories where the character is slow on the uptake that often.

As is typical for me, the story is definitely open-ended in its conclusion. The main story problem(s) is / are solved, but there's clearly a lot else to do ...

Finished an insane five chapters editing this week. My observations are that I'm going to need a draft where every time I see a continuity issue, I bookmark my place and skim through the rest of the manuscript to make sure I've adhered to it. I think this is best done as a separate pass through the manuscript. I'm fixing or tweaking too much else in this one.

I'm just starting to edit "Stolen Moments." I read it through yesterday to get an overall sense of it, and while it has some rough edges and needs some tightening, there's a lot of intriguing stuff going on. I have a good feeling about this one, but the cynic in me remembers that last year, I didn't even get a story held by Sword & Sorceress (unlike the first 2-3 years), so I'm not holding my breath.

3/24 - 3/30
Pages edited: 27
Word count: 3,008