Picking up where left off before we were so rudely interrupted by writing a whole other book for no good reason.
54 rough draft pages have evolved into 68 revised pages. Since it’s been a while, I’ll remind everyone my first drafts have few complete sentences and almost no description, so I can easily add 30% more words in the first revision just by bring the prose up to minimum standards of intelligibility. I’m not adding bulk for the sake of it—the text would be incomprehensible without most of these words. Also, I’m not striving for a hypothetical word count, so the progress bar is measured with the only known numbers: the 240 pages of the first draft and the number of pages of it that have been dealt with at the time of reporting.
Heroine is now on her fourth(?) name. When last we met, I had realized her name at that time rhymed with that of her nemesis, so I changed the nemesis’s name. Then I changed the first letter of Heroine’s name to avoid a similarity to a different piece of media… and now it matches the part of the nemesis’s name it used to rhyme with. At this rate, she may end up fully stealing her former mentor’s identity in a blatant become-that-which-you-despise move that only I will appreciate because no one else has had to suffer through all these find-and-replaces.
Names are my nemesis. My name-esis, if you will. When they’re right (or at least minimally acceptable), they don’t nag at me. Hero took to his new name without problems. A dozen secondary characters never needed adjustment at all. I just haven’t stumbled onto the right handle for the most important character in the book.
One of my margin notes is PUT PEOPLE IN PLACES!!! This setting is a kingdom cursed to sleep, but it’s not like they had a 20-minute warning to crawl into bed before the curse went into effect. Everybody was going about their day and dropped where they were. Accordingly, there aren’t a lot of places you can go that will be vacant, and even if you aren’t a hypervigilant former assassin, an unconscious human being can’t be overlooked as easily as a chair. I need to (a) make sure people are present where people would have been when the curse struck, (b) find ways to humanize unconscious people so readers recognize them as more than props, and (c) use Heroine’s treatment of them to characterize her (e.g., she keeps track of what she “borrows” so she can repay her debts in the extremely unlikely event the unwitting lender’s life is restored so “I’ve been robbed!” isn’t added to the lengthy list of problems they’ll wake up to).
Heroine is a theater kid, she has always expected to die badly, and she has a great deal of disdain for the land’s most legendary hero. At some point, I decided it would be in character for such a person to belt out a few lines of a ballad about that hero (tweaked to reflect the singer’s viewpoint) when things have reached the point where turning the situation into a musical number can’t possibly make things any worse. Sadly, that means I have to write a few lines of that song. Because “everybody knows” Fantasy = Medieval European, I started looking up songs from Fantasy = Medieval European properties (Elder Scrolls, Witcher, LOTR, etc.) for inspiration. HOWEVER, on the rare occasions I want musical accompaniment for this story, I go for the Fallout: New Vegas soundtrack, which has twangy, industrial Western vibes for the instrumental portions and twisted lyrics (like I want to do with this ballad!) for “Home on the Range,” “Red River Valley,” and “Streets of Laredo,” which is very much not medieval European in tone. That particular era of cowboy music is a little too Old School for me, but Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson? I can work with that. And so it came to pass that the great ballad about the Savior of Isveloma (What a Chump Remix) is now being built over the tune of “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys.”