Ripples in the Pool

The good news: I'm up to revising Chapter 19 of Book B, Crow's Blood.
The not-as-good news: I'm updating the blog less frequently than I did writing the 0-draft while revising

The last four chapters or so have involved a good deal of rearranging and rewriting, which has considerably slowed my pace and eaten up my revision time, but I think the story is all that much stronger for it.

The little changes from the final outline that I've made while writing the ending and revising the beginning are sending out ripples that meet in the middle of the book. Those ripples are ensuring that I have a lot of clean up to do.

When I look back at the original concept of this story, and the rough and detailed outlines that followed I'm astonished at how much it's changed. All for the sake of trying to write the best story possible. I don't think the "me" that had the original idea would recognize much beyond the setting and the villain (I think villains are a strength of mine).

The main character? Changed entirely while tightening the outline! The main I've written the entire book around used to be the original main's foil in the original outline. That first main is still in the book, but as a secondary character.

The original outline had five major viewpoint characters and six vignette's (single chapters) from minor viewpoints. In reworking the outline I brought it down to one viewpoint and seven vignette viewpoints. My main viewpoint has grown a fair bit stronger as a result, and I've felt less stressed about the vignette viewpoints, which has made writing each of them as a separate character easier.

In simplifying the structure and the various side plots I've given more room for the actual characters to come through, though admittedly I do still have a ways to go on breaking out of the "white room" problem. I'm working to add more description about the characters physical surroundings with each revision pass.

This particular pass is all about plot and making sure that everything works without great big holes.

Now That's a plot hole!

I'm closing every one of those up that I find. As I said earlier, I'm finding a lot more in the middle than I did at the beginning or than I expect to at the end. This is a learning process, so who's to say if I have more sitting near the end waiting to swallow me whole?

Then I'll start letting my Critique Partners have a look at some of it (all if they think it's their thing) and I'll do a pass of line edits (not that I'm not trying to get as much of that done as possible on this pass) while they're building their massive weapons of feedback to destroy my soul. But that's getting ahead of myself, how about I finish the plot pass first?

That's where things sit right now. I'm still plugging away, for anywhere between two and four hours a night, trying not to let too much of that time escape into "the Twitter".

Just add arsenic!

The Real Life™side of things is going well, though I'm building a snuggle debt with my wife and a serious backlog of recorded TV while revising. She takes care of her photography stuff, gaming, and Facebook socializing while I grind, buff, and polish this story so it hopefully has some lustre to it.

She keeps providing me with homemade hot cocoa while I'm writing, so she still loves me, or she's poisoning me slowly and it just tastes really good.

Either way I'll keep drinking the stuff in the great big mildly disturbing Mickey Mouse mug it gets given to me in.

Oh, and I've been introduced to a band called Caravan Palace by Bridget Smith who heard them in a coffee shop and described what she was hearing on Twitter as "jazz-influenced electronica" in a genre that is apparently properly called "Electro-swing". It's not for everyone (including my wife) but I like it.