Ok, so I suck at blogging.

Granted, you all know that better than I do.  Let's see.  March, April, May, June.. not too bad, I've only been silent on here for four months.  One third of a year.  An entire revision and a bit of my book.

Yeah, so that's the good news, I'm still writing, getting into the "work" part of the whole thing.  I'm enjoying it, more so on this revision than the previous revision.  I think that's mostly due to having a much better sense of all the major plot points and how they fit and weave together.

And the characters!  Oh, how they torture me.  I've cut, combined, and heavily altered seven or eight characters so far in this revision, all in the name of making the characters I keep stronger, more complete people.  I'm also cutting down on the number of viewpoints severely, which allows me to do a little more misdirection and pull off some of the surprises a little better (i hope).  Let's call it addition by subtraction.  See, it's not just for big cost-cutting corporate empires any more.

This revision, we'll call it full revision 2, is being done a little differently, aside from the above standard revising process of executing my little literary loved ones with aplomb (or at the very least feigned aplomb), and the mandatory re-writing of, well, damned near everything so it doesn't feel like tripe.

This time around I'm writing entire story arcs, start to finish, from a single view-point character.  Essentially I'm writing a third person narrative of each view-point character as they experience the events of the book.  So far I'm about a sixth of the way through a single character.

It doesn't sound like much, but when you consider that I've actually only been at this revision itself for about two weeks, it's not a bad pace.  It is a new method for me, but one that several actual writers I've been in contact with recommend for getting inside a character's head.  It's working wonders, at least for me, and I'm hoping the finished product of this draft will have characters that don't feel quite so wooden.  If I pull that off on this revision, I may even let some of my Alpha readers have a peek for some feedback.

My notes are turning into a veritable spider-web of details, most of which will never be IN the book, but they make me feel better knowing that I have reasons and the "how" of everything written down and worked out.

Real Life has been picking up at work, big projects and all that.  I'm staying on top of it.  Home life is relatively peaceful and quiet, it not being hockey season and all that.

I'll try to blog more often, but I'm sure I've said that somewhere before.  Right now though, the book takes precedence over the blog, it's a matter of priorities.  Time for bed.

- Grimm