I’ve been doing the slice-of-life thing for a year now, which is a long enough trial to conclude I’m not a fan. Rather than engendering empathy, it seems to invite people to view other’s lives as entertainment and complain when the season doesn’t live up to expectations. There’s no benefit to me, but there is a cost I’m no longer going to pay. I can’t strip my humanity from my writing/revising/publishing/teaching process, but I can stick to that business and will be doing so henceforth.
Settin’ boundaries around my boundaries’ boundaries FTW.
Not worth doing a progress bar this installment because I’ve spent more time fixing things behind me than forging ahead. I would have held off on reporting until the bar moved, but I’m overdue for proof of life again.
I’ve noticed a tendency to raise a question that can’t possibly be answered, followed by a several-paragraph struggle to say “welp, no way of knowing” and transition back to what’s going on. Know what helps? Just leave the obviously unanswerable question unanswered and have another character (or some other thing) draw the POV character’s and the reader’s attention to something other than the question. Keep moving forward—the mystery will follow.
“Work out the throughline of her suspicions about X because it’s flimsy as-is” isn’t a note I want to be leaving myself at this point, but alas, here we are. I know things now about other characters that I didn’t know before. The trick is smacking together their truth-obscuring actions, Heroine’s suspicions, and the actual truth in a way that arouses readers’ curiosity and builds tension rather than confusion.
I wanted to write a growth-spurt book. I forgot the small fact that growth spurts are agonizing. I’ve overextended myself to the point where joints are dislocating and tendons are snapping like overtaxed rubber bands, and I’m not confident volunteering for this procedure wasn’t a huge mistake because if I can’t pull myself together, I’ll be floppy forever, which is worse than where I started. Penalized for my hubris![efn_note]That’s a fun Icarus correlate for a secondary world cultural reference, though. Origin story for some loose-jointed horror? Into the incubator with that one…[/efn_note]
Fuck it, I went back to the beginning to see if hitting a few things with a hammer would make the giant mechanical spider that is this story promenade more smoothly here around the 40% mark. Pressing onward despite the lurching and squealing and steam shooting out of places it oughtn’t seemed like a good way to experience a catastrophe. I didn’t give it the full Round 3 treatment, but I made necessary adjustments to Hero, who has quietly, cheerfully been a problem from the beginning. He’s not in control of his own fate. He has to adjust to whatever situation he’s thrown into. By necessity, he’s a liar and opportunist. He knows what the honorable path is, he might even want to take it, but he can’t afford to take it. I had him being priggish about several things solely to be at odds with Heroine, which makes no sense because he went to considerable trouble to get her help and would want to keep her happy and motivated, not piss her off. This isn’t only-romance, in which the relationship has to supply the vast majority of the conflict. There’s enough external stuff going on that they can work together peaceably, except for him being untrustworthy because he lies all the time and his suicidally heroic tendencies. There’s no need for him to be an asshole for the sake of being an asshole.
The parts where his obstruction transformed to facilitation will need to be smoothed in Round 3, but the supporting logic is at least in place, and I feel a little better about pressing onward.
Okay, and I’ve worked out Hero’s plans for Heroine as they pertain to one of his pre-story events, the evolution thereof, and the pivot around a piece of missing information. Lo and behold, in one place it becomes more advantageous to tell the truth (or a version thereof, or maybe two truths and a lie) for a change. I’m not sure if there’s a place where her missing information and his missing information can collide spectacularly in a reveal, but I’ll keep watch.
I had the bright idea it might be useful to have a brief passage (paragraphs as opposed to pages) from a near-omniscient source of ambiguous identity at the start (and possibly the end) to frame a story that’s one move in the final stage of a game that’s been going on for thousands of years. I don’t need it, but there might be some benefit to giving readers context the characters on the board don’t have. Nothing definite yet and certainly not a priority, but into the incubator it goes. We’ll see what hatches.[efn_note]I first thought the “ambiguous” POV could be A or B. Then I thought, ooh, what if it was C? Which led me to, wait, couldn’t it be D? And I got REALLY EXCITED about that one. If I word it correctly, readers will think it could be A or D or (after a bombshell in a mid-series book) B, and there’s the ambiguity about where this insight is coming from. This is why we don’t stop at our first idea. First ideas are not-always-but-usually obvious and shallow, and more thought leads to better ideas. On the rare occasions that first thought turns out to be a stroke of genius, 10/10, no notes, you can still use it after giving it some competition to prove it’s the winner.[/efn_note]
Made a note to put more emphasis on sounds, specifically those made by living things. Heroine notes the lack when she goes to the cursed kingdom where every living thing is “sleeping,” but there’s no punch to “no noise” if I haven’t made any particular note of “normal noise” previously. A late-stage sensory edit is normal for me, and I’m very keen on purpose-driven details rather than relying on vibes. I spend most of my day wearing earplugs because auditory vibes are very much not my jam, so the purpose is, in fact, entirely necessary.
I apparently went for absolute clarity with my pronoun-vs.-name use in the previous draft, and it’s annoying me as a reader now. At some point, we’ll have to go through and correct for common sense clarity. I have at least one early reader and a proofreader who will call out “who now?” failures if my annoyance is a poor judge.
I fiddled with changing Hero’s name again (due to a previously reported conflict with another character’s name, the latter of which I prefer to keep), but I “tidied” my worktable and now can’t find my character notecards in order to do a side-by-side scan for new regrettable consequences. Since Heroine’s name eventually settled on something one letter off from Hero’s original name, naming madness demanded I give him the same treatment, but the result would have been shared with “the world’s most famous cat,” per search engine. There are worse associations, but I didn’t feel great about it, so we’re going to try one based on scrambled letters from the actor who gave Hero a face. Start the “you’re not going to believe this, but” countdown clock!
I need to figure out a way to get first readers to grade foreshadowing. I get heavy-handed (HERE IS EXACTLY WHAT’S GOING TO HAPPEN), then I cut it back, and then I’m unable to tell if the light touch works at all. It defeats the purpose to call attention to the foreshadowing while they’re reading, and they obviously won’t be able to compare the shadow to what casts it until they’ve passed both, so it would be an at-the-end thing. Ah. Suddenly I recognize the “validate how clever I was” element to this, so no, I do not need to figure out a way. I trust them to notice and point at problems, so unless they say “wow, that sucked,” the grade is passing. There’s an item on the questionnaire for “didn’t notice at the time, but in hindsight, that sucked,” so everything (except my fee-fees) is pretty well covered.
Fuel an author!