Finally got through the go-back-and-fix portion, including the “maybe move that later thing here” notes I had left in some places to be addressed in Round Three. Easier to deal with the hole from the extraction when I get to it later than to perform the extraction, transplant, and repair all at once and cross my fingers everything heals perfectly without my full attention because I can’t be in two places and everywhere in between at once. Less work for Future Me, but YIKES, this has been a costly digression.[efn_note]Which probably has a lot to do with, yes, sinking into full Round 3 revision mode sometimes. Nitpicks didn’t urgently need to be changed, but could I be really, really sure I’d catch them months from now? Better to scratch the itch immediately. And that other itch. And that one over there.[/efn_note]
For posterity, here’s one of my favorite exchanges that went bye-bye due to Hero becoming less prissy about criming:
“We’re not here to steal from these people.”
He’d thrown the treasure hunter mask far after peeling it off to reveal the honorable hero mask beneath. Unless the mask the next layer down came with a fat purse, they’d get no farther than the first checkpoint on the highway without stealing from someone. “No one is less likely to object than the dead, and should they rise, you’ll have bigger problems than accusations of theft.”
Lost some foreshadowing, but I think it has enough presence elsewhere. Moment of silence for paragraphs that are no longer with us, then full speed ahead.
The ADHD finally snatched that idea about the ambiguous-POV prologue from the air and explained in one go how it’s going to play out across five books.[efn_note]Imagine having a million slow cookers that have no controls other than a “start cooking” button. You throw in the ingredients for something you’d like to eat at some point in the future (not NOW, lol, crackers and dry cereal suffice NOW), push the “start cooking” button, and then walk away and forget about it because you have no control over when it will be done. Could be 2 a.m. that night. Could be 5 years later. There’s frequently a pot going “ding!”, but which one is in the hands of fate, you’re probably not interested in eating it anymore, and there’s never a sensation of having cooked whatever’s inside. That’s how I learn and solve problems. There’s no conscious process, just chuck information whole into the brain pot and await fork-tender enlightenment. (I had to stop in the middle of typing this and go unravel part of a patchwork sweater I’m crocheting because ding! the pocket on the current side would have been slanted in the wrong direction unfixably if I’d gone any further seaming at the angle I had been. Wasn’t thinking about it AT ALL at that moment, but the revelation was done cooking.)[/efn_note] I had a bold introductory paragraph in the book description that evolves for each book over the course of the series, and I love it, but it pushes the description into Daunting Wall o’ Text territory. If it is instead the first paragraph of the book, I get to keep it and pare down the jacket copy to a reasonable length.[efn_note]And I can still use it to fill out the ENORMOUS AMOUNT OF SPACE on the back of a trade paperback. Those are a design nightmare if you haven’t collected blurbs and advanced reviews as filler. I once proposed making the bar code 5×4 inches, but apparently that’s not an acceptable solution. *pfft*[/efn_note] Win-win. The rest of the actual text of this frame is extremely raw at this point, but that is always how the text begins. It’ll catch up eventually.
In Revision 1, I added a couple of scenes to get Heroine and Hero into Big City to prove the ease of avoiding trouble is over. Since these scenes were new, they were rough draft quality, and my rough is ROUGH. Few complete sentences. Spots I can’t even guess what point I was trying to make. Plus Hero’s personality transplant to contend with. Gobs and gobs of work trying to bring it up close to the same level as surrounding text that has already had the benefit of a full revision. It’ll catch up eventually!
And now I’ve sent a random NPC on a quest and had to show a piece of information he was no longer around to tell so there are NEW untouched words! Fingers crossed I’m making good decisions…
I have two “blah blah, but blah blah” sentences in a row, which I’m not happy about. Unfortunately, the logic train also passes through a third ‘blah blah, but blah blah” sentence. Maybe three will trick people into believing the repetitive sentence structure is a literary device rather than me not being able to figure out how to avoid repetitive sentence structure? Or maybe I’ll cut this part later because it’s not relevant to this story and I only might use it in the series. Or maybe it’ll be perfectly clear later how to reword the same information without the repetitive structure. More work for Future Me!
Trying a bold new approach in which, rather than showing characters discussing the plan and then executing the plan and everything going according to the plan, I just show you the plan in action. Plan: qty 1. THERE ARE TIMES when spelling out some or all of the plan to readers in advance may be better (e.g., part of the plan-doing takes place far from the POV character and plan-making is all the reader will know about it, or to emphasize how horribly-not-according-to-plan events actually unfold), but when documenting both will produce mostly redundant information, cut the talking one and keep the doing one. Bye-bye, page of dialogue. Nothing of value lost this time.
Fuel an authorKo-Fi now accepts Venmo[efn_note]Some restrictions apply, including USA-based creators only and one-time donations but not recurring payments/memberships.[/efn_note] as well as PayPal and Stripe/Link, should that influence anyone’s willingness to support any creator there.