In this round of revision, I unraveled the mystery of my repeated notes to “mention a train.” Trains are technologically appropriate for the worldbuilding, but no one rides one in this story, and Past Me harped on it an awful lot for it to be only a handy size comparison for one creature.
One bad morning when I was feeling especially burned out and pathetic, my brain threw me a bone: A train route is a good explanation for a construction project that’s been handwavy prior to this point. This creates room for evolution of Heroine’s thought process about the villain’s plan (grasping the obvious explanation → figuring out the super dastardly scheme with far-reaching catastrophic implications) rather than immediately intuiting the whole thing, which always felt like a stretch.
Who knows, maybe I can even redistribute information delivery to fit a third step in there. Ore mine, enemy camp, and Big City #1 are three existing intel-gathering points that could be used to support this idea growth.
Lol, sending Future Me the gift of a lifelong subscription to the Ongoing Substantial Revision Club. Whee!
People occasionally express concern that I’m spoiling the book with these updates. I’m confident this is more about process and the story particulars are vague enough to be nearly meaningless.
As proof that I do have some discretion, I had a big chunk here regarding a revelation about the overarching series plot provoked by recent revision. I haven’t even decided if I’m going to pursue that revelation, but I felt it was too much to share and deleted it.
So relax. I may drunkenly stagger through the writing process even after 27 years of practice, but I’ve been training to be secretive since before I started speaking in the presence of witnesses. I’m not giving away anything unintentionally.
I had to write another four lines of the “heroism is for chumps” song that Heroine sings when she’s being bait. Forty-four syllables took a Thursday to write.
Songwriting is a skill. I do not possess it.
Me when someone’s attributing genius to lyrics because they don’t rhyme: Well actually, most songs that aren’t written for toddler singalongs don’t adhere to perfect rhyme.[efn_note]There’s a song by Satellite and the Harpoonist that “rhymes” “Richard Pryor” and “Gene Wilder,” so excuse me if I’m not wowed by pairing “asked” and “gas.”[/efn_note]
Me when writing lyrics: I will for-real literally die if the words at the end of the lines aren’t identical except for the first letter.[efn_note]In the aforementioned example, the assonance and consonance in that long I and terminal R make it work. Though I understand that concept, making it work myself is like nailing Jell-O to a tree. Maybe it’s because I’m more concerned with how words look than how they sound, whereas a sound-prioritizing mind has an easier time calling up words by phonemes? Bummer none of the musicians I know are lyricists so I can pick their brains about how their brains work.[/efn_note]
Editor Angie (who is also my editor at my soulless corporate writing gig) said I should write the whole epic ballad as bonus material. My reply:
This batch involved two big action scenes back to back. I cut some sentences that added nothing. Those cuts improved pacing. With a few word tweaks, I was otherwise happy with this section.[efn_note]I’m not saying this section is good, only that things that bother me elsewhere are absent here.[/efn_note]
Emotion is a weak point for me. I’m much better with action and intrigue. At times like these, I wonder if I’d be a poor person’s idea of rich (AKA middle class) if I’d started out writing anything other than romance.[efn_note]My share of the advance for one co-authored middle-grade fantasy was greater than the sum of the advances for 40 trad pub romances. Granted, that was the worst publishing experience I ever had! But the money did dramatically improve quality of life for me, my kid, and my co-author and her family for a couple of years. Romance, in contrast, paid me an average of $3 an hour for labor that would have been more profitably spent at any minimum-wage job. That genre seems the most deeply committed to writers who can afford to write as a hobby. (Which you should keep in mind for the annual hand-wringing about the lack of diversity in the genre diversity report. Money is a weapon in all kinds of -isms.)[/efn_note]
