By the time this posts, Editor Angie will be in possession of a far-too-ugly version of the manuscript. Since my work is nowhere near done, however, the revision update show must go on.
In fact, I might do another draft before I even look at her feedback. “I KNOW THAT, I WASN’T FINISHED YET!” is already coiled on the tip of my tongue, ready to leap. Why put myself through a defensive wringer when I could have the satisfaction of “I know that, already fixed” and concentrate on the insights I couldn’t reach on my own?
I backtracked a little and pared down the sex scene to tilt more Fantasy than Romance. Lots of fantasy novels include sex, but there’s generally less detail about thrusting and throbbing and spurting than in romance novels that include sex.
Years of churning out monster-fucking porn have burned me out on thrusting and throbbing and spurting. I feel more at ease having removed a significant chunk of text I found tedious.
This hung out at the bottom of my screen, merrily bouncing, while I typed that, as though admonishing my rejection of jiggling bewbs.
I changed the location of a scene because the original was nonsensical. (“Let’s be freezing and wet voluntarily when there are plentiful other options!” Yeah, I don’t know what I was thinking either.) That entailed changing the transition to the physical space, every reference to the physical space, and every action performed in relation to the physical space. Start poking things and dialogue starts rearranging to accommodate the shape of its new environment because writing from a position that no part of a story exists in a vacuum makes changing anything exponentially more difficult.
A discouraging amount of work, but preferable to keeping a boneheaded decision. I mean, either of them might go for self-flagellation after recent events, but neither would allow the other to do the same. Suffering together is fine when there is no other choice. When comfort and safety are available, you get people you care about into it, at knifepoint if necessary.
A lot of dialogue was affected by the condensed/shuffled timeline and letting Hero know some things about his own lived experience a few scenes back. This was a very long talky scene that is now a much shorter talky scene. A big chunk of stuff got dumped in the Use Elsewhere file, but mostly stuff goes there to die.
Some words lead you where you need to go without their escort mission being part of the story, and that’s okay.
Hero expresses his plan for the post-quest future. There was originally a prolonged “don’t be an asshole” argument about this that I always felt was unnecessarily aggressive. Now Heroine pushes back a little bit before coming around to the idea that maybe 20 years of suffering is enough to ask of him and maybe he does deserve a vacation after saving a kingdom. Maybe someday he’ll have a change of heart, but she’s not going to insist someone she cares about do something that will cause him pain for the benefit of strangers.
We’ll see how well this works in later chapters when there’s some confusion about whether a big decision is motivated by self-sacrifice or assholery. I’ll probably need to find another opportunity to give him a gentle nudge off his chosen path to better support the possibility he changed his mind, but maybe the bones are already there. It’s been so long since I last saw the tail end of this story, I remember only the broadest “they go here and do this” strokes. Who knows what Past Me left me to work with?
Previously, their journey to Big City 2 consisted of “yeah, well, if you want that errand run in a hurry, you better get us there” and *scene break* they’re deposited near the destination. Thanks to the timeline shuffle, that journey has a different starting point and mode of transportation.
Nothing hugely dramatic happens on the road, so “They had an uneventful journey to Big City 2” and getting on with the action is an option, but putting something there is a good opportunity to quietly address how they feel about yesterday’s trauma, last night’s sex, that morning’s leaving a bunch of helpless people completely defenseless for lack of a better option, etc., and doing so while they’re physically moving forward makes a very talky/thinky scene feel less static.
It also supports why they went to the objectively more dangerous Big City 1 first—the path to Big City 2 is more arduous even with the transportation assist they’ve subsequently acquired. Also also, I wanted to bring back a lesser magical being from early on and alter Heroine’s perception of it being a nuisance so a bit later she has a reasonable reason to think maybe a much larger menace is trying to help in its own terrifying, potentially fatal way. Basically, this is stuffed full of callbacks to remind readers what all is going on as we enter the home stretch and to scaffold what’s coming.
I don’t feel great about this section, but it’s normal to not feel great about anything of first-draft quality. Probably needs the usual amount of trimming, combining, and rearranging. We’ll see what it looks like after I hit it with the revision stick a few times.
That should be the end of the damage from the timeline shuffle, since the cut happened before Big City 2, where we have now arrived. Fingers crossed no more from-scratch writing (and multiple revision passes to fix crud the surrounding text has already had beaten out of it) will be required.
Still waiting for that “downhill slope” feeling where this book gets the teeniest bit easier.
