Revision resumes with arrival at Big City 1.
The story has been sparsely populated up to this point. There’s a shift of dynamic between having the run of the environment and having to work around people who have their own work to do and don’t give a damn about your problems, thank you very much, until you become one of theirs.
(I forgot to refresh the screen before I took a snapshot of the progress bar, which is why 45% on the meter looks more like 60.)
Me: Come on, spellcheck. “Villainize” has to be a word.
Merriam-Webster: Well, if you must, but “vilify” is right there without sounding like you’re adding -ize to random nouns because you can’t be bothered to use perfectly good verbs that have been around for centuries. Might as well cheddarize that béchamel to flavorize your mac while you’re at it.
I was poised to defend the elegance of -ize in many constructions, but then I remembered how “conversate” and “orientate” make me breathe fire, so I shut my pedantic yap and took “vilify” so my story about Sleeping Beauty blackmailing John Wick into breaking a curse will be taken seriously.
(The elder, dignified character who speaks the word would use “vilify.” Never change words just because you, the author, think sounding like a thesaurus will impress someone.)
Heroine decided against doing something for very good reasons, and then did it anyway with no prompt for this change of thinking. I couldn’t think of an effective prompt, so I deleted the decision not to do it and carried on as if it had been her plan all along.
If deterrents are so specific to the story that readers can’t deduce them independently, those deterrents don’t exist if you simply don’t spell them out. Poof! Like magic, a character can be not at all worried about that thing getting in the writer’s way.
(Of note, this does not work if the deterrent is so obvious readers will think the writer is a chucklehead for ignoring it.)
Cut some more premature, shoehorned romance-y stuff.
Kept the part where Hero moves through a crowd, drawing all eyes toward him by asking if anyone has seen his imaginary spouse, who is obviously Heroine and whom he describes rather poetically, because he has already noted, in so many words, that their dislike is no longer mutual.
Heroine, however, is still in the eye-rolling stage and won’t be forced to tell him he’s pretty in return out of my prior misguided sense of convention.
The more logistics repair I have to do, the less energy I have for prose fine tuning. Theoretically, logistics will be in good shape on the subsequent revision pass so I can focus entirely on fine tuning, but it’s still disheartening now to leave so much in rough shape.
Not counting my write-for-hire work, this is my 40-something-th novel. I’ve been through all this before. The first 20% or so will barely need to be touched next round, so the “starting” energy can be applied to a later point, and the drudgery I’m doing now won’t have to be done again so that energy will stretch further. I know the writing process gets better, every time, regardless of how chaotic the life around it is.
And I know Life clearly doesn’t want me to ever finish this book and sticking with it through the absolutely brutal obstacle course of the past few years is an achievement unto itself, but I’m so exhausted and the end never seems to get any closer and crash have another obstacle, as a treat.
