There sure have been a lot of opportunities lately to practice keeping my eyes on my own paper. Like most people, I’ll have a kneejerk reaction to an Inflammatory Thing, but if I take two minutes to think about it rather than responding immediately, I frequently come to a realization the Inflammatory Thing has no effect on anyone other than The Inflamer and I won’t be sad if they burn themselves with it. Ideally, my knee will eventually stop jerking entirely, but simply not having social media to facilitate that instantaneous negativity dump has done me a world of good already.
160 rough draft pages have become 260 revised pages, officially surpassing the length of the rough draft! 🥳
I took on an extra-long chunk that ends in a weird place solely to get to 67% so I can feel like I’m over an imaginary hump. It’s not like I have hopes and dreams for the book, given that self-publishing has become very much “You have to spend money on promo to make money!” and I can’t play because I’m at the rationing-ibuprofen level of poverty, but I’d still like to finish it before I die. I made a commitment to not be a vengeful spirit specifically so I could be free of this hellhole, and it would suck to be held to that if unfinished business traps me here as a sad, hand-wringy ghost.
This part starts with a short scene I rushed through the first time to get from Point A to Point B. Since it’s the morning after a great deal of trauma, it demands some thoughts and feelings, so I slowed it down to do some emotional processing. That required new content, in which I included a couple of lines about something Heroine might do after the story[efn_note]I wrote this story as August’s short-story-a-month project, so “might” no longer applies. Six minor tasks checked off Heroine’s to-do list and one off mine.[/efn_note], mostly to serve the illusion that the world is bigger than this book, but it also provides a bridge to a “bonus” story about tidying up loose ends that aren’t relevant in the book but I (and perhaps one reader somewhere) want to see resolved anyway.[efn_note]Really, I can’t emphasize enough how minor these things are. For example, if Heroine “borrows” something from an unconscious person, pointedly distinguishing it from outright theft, it would be mannerly to return or replace it later. Are we going to hang out for an extra month after the proper ending of the book while she attends to random minor tasks scattered over half the continent? No, but I can smoosh them all together in a few thousand words and make them available to anyone who cares.[/efn_note] The addition doesn’t feel obtrusive, like it’s creating an expectation of redress, but we’ll see how I feel about it on the next pass. As oft mentioned, this is the embiggening draft, and not everything thrown at it is going to stick.
A subsequent scene gave Heroine a surprise, which she valiantly tried to fit into the puzzle created by Hero’s as-yet unresolved lies. What I had in the first draft was… a reach, to put it mildly, as a great kindness to Past Me’s creative struggles. The surprise is a plot-necessary revelation. Heroine would naturally have some sort of reaction to it. The reaction I gave her initially was just not it. So I yoinked the entire flimsy conspiracy theory (which Heroine would never have spun because she’s an architect of conspiracies, for fuck’s sake), and used her attachment to Hero, which has become better developed in this draft, as the emotional fuel for the scene. As much as I dislike sticking fresh, raw writing patches in a draft that’s a little more polished all around it, it was a necessary change, and it will all buff out in the end.
And then I did a CHOP, which is always scarier than a PLUS, despite having a paper copy and several untouched backups of the previous draft in all my save locations if I change my mind later.[efn_note]I changed my mind later. It’s the embiggening draft! I made them talk about more The Past! All of the “this isn’t great” I talk about here still applies (now with more not greatness!), but pacing is a problem for Future Me.[/efn_note] Hero had to explain a bit of ancient history, and I realized, as it was dragging on and on and on, that it was effectively a flashback despite Heroine interrogating him to draw out the information she wanted. Flashbacks aren’t inherently, universally evil, but any time you bring the present action to a complete stop to infodump something that happened before, off page, done deal, nothing to do about it now, there’s a high risk of making readers yawn. Often, there are alternatives to a flashback that spare readers a screeching halt. My thought last time was obviously “I’ll make it exciting by having her badger him for information!”, which might have worked if it was quick, but it just dragged on for too bloody long. There’s not some surrounding action taking place that I can use as a more interesting scaffold for the conversation. I can’t portion out the infodump elsewhere because she’s catching him in a lie that could get her killed, and this is where he comes clean. So I sacrificed the “immediacy” of dialogue by summarizing a good chunk of the past between the start and end of her interrogation. Now you get all the information and her most important reactions to it but in about a third of the space, and then we can get on to more pressing business, which will be shaped by these revelations. I would like to come up with some better, inspired solution at some point before publication, but for now, “somewhat better than that tedious flashback” will do.[efn_note]The embiggening draft has some rules that are exclusive to it, but “It doesn’t have to be perfect, just better” applies to every revision pass. Gods know I aspire to make every draft the last when I start it, but when every word needs attention, it’s too overwhelming to fix everything before moving forward. At some point in every draft, I resolve to just clear some space around the bigger piles of garbage and tackle them next time around.[/efn_note]
This is where Heroine gets her hands very dirty and it becomes a relief no one will ever read this book. She spells out, explicitly, how the only other option would be worse. It’s not debatable—Hero does object, but he soon realizes inaction would not only cause the pain Heroine seeks to prevent but also spread to traumatize more people than she’s immediately concerned with. But it’s going to fail the Heroine Likability Test.[efn_note]A friend made a bingo card of my predictions. I get a prize if the misattribution of evil deeds to the people who have to deal with the damage done by the actual villains unfolds as foretold. I lobbied for a grand prize for a coverall, but no one ever wants to gamble big against my powers of prophecy (AKA pattern recognition combined with grim clarity about human behavior).[/efn_note] If a hero did it (not just this one—any of them), it would be “oh, the poor dear, that must be such a burden on his tormented soul,” but everybody else has to adhere to a different set of rules. Fuck it. I had to pull my punches for 15 years because publishers like to play safe, and it got me exactly nowhere. I’m going to write things that are ugly and honest and earn all the nowhere I get henceforth.
And now we have the intersection of a couple of key things (the truth is out in the open, they’ve been emotionally traumatized by several increasingly bad days in a row), which means it’s time for that slow burn to come to fruition. They’ve established a new level of trust[efn_note]They started at “you’re cute but I don’t like you,” graduated to “you’re cute and I like you but I don’t trust you,” and have now evolved to “you’re cute, I like you, and I trust you enough to be naked and vulnerable for a few minutes.” Baby steps![/efn_note], and they’ve Been Through Some Shit Together and have a mutual need for comfort. No vows of eternal devotion because “You’re the one for me until my dying day” loses some significance when you’re both sure you’ll both be dead within the next couple of days, but taking this risk and having it not end in disaster is a good bonding experience.
The revision of that scene was mostly making the sentences whole because the thinky/feely bits were already there and I’ve had the liberating realization that I have less than zero interest in competing in the Romance Novel Fuckalympics. I don’t like closed door—if sex is going to be part of a relationship, I want enough information to make me believe it’s satisfying for everyone involved—but on the flip side of that coin, there are too many opportunities in a 30-page, excruciatingly detailed bangfest to make me dubious even if I’m told it ends with “and then everybody had multiple orgasms ever after.” Since there’s a nonzero chance I’ll be the sole audience for this book, I may as well pander to my preference that bodily functions not be used as a substitute for relationship development.
Heroine has her “ah, fuck” moment upon realizing the willingness to abandon the quest she’s been holding in reserve is now useless because she has no such willingness to abandon Hero. Not because they had sex so now she’s required to be in luuuuurve but because the horribleness of the ordeal finally peeled them both down to raw emotion (that just happened to find an outlet through sex but would have existed regardless), she’s seen what his suffering will look like if they fail, and that future isn’t happening to him on her watch. “I’m a loner, Dottie, a rebel” only works as long as you don’t actually care, and, well… “ah, fuck.” That ship sailed a while ago, and it’s too far gone to call back to port now that she’s noticed it disappearing on the horizon.
And that brings us to the end of this chonk. Up next: Let’s Go Punch a Dragon!