I’ve long known my resting murder face has a lot to do with how I have to hold my jaw so I don’t constantly clench/grind my teeth, but I’ve only recently realized how much energy suppressing that consumes. So many little physical things are a constant battery drain. If somebody invented a bite guard that converted force into electricity, I’d give in to the clench, generate all my own household power, and have surplus to sell. Don’t let all this green and renewable stress go to waste, science people!
171 rough draft pages have become 275 revised pages.
Action-wise, this is basically 10 pages of preparing to climb a mountain and climbing the mountain, which is very little doing taking place around the talking. That screams “pacing problem” to me. I do often limp through the back end of the second act because I was in a hurry to tell you everything and ran out of important business before getting the characters where they physically need to be for the next important business. Sometimes fixing this involves moving prematurely deployed plot.[efn_note]I need to figure out a visual indicator that shows during outlining where I have action holes. I work really hard to arrange plot events so they can occur only in that place at that time, which is great where it works but a catastrophe when I inevitably need something mobile. If I could see where the hole is while I still have some flexibility in the planning stage, I’d have one less thing to cry about in the second draft and beyond.[/efn_note] This time, I can’t see an obvious transplant, so fixing it will most likely require adding something new. I don’t want to plop something completely disconnected here as an authorial convenience, so we’re going to flag the problem and hope the last 30% of the book suggests some existing thing that can be better developed here. If not, Future Me will have to plant a new seed earlier in the next draft with a plan to bear fruit here.
There were two Heroine-Hero conversations in this section that got inexplicably hostile, thoroughly unsupported by the characters’ emotional state. If it was an early attempt to compensate for the lack of action, it did more harm than good. They’re heading off to probably-die—there’s no need to be at each other’s throats in the name of conflict.[efn_note]There’s probably a ridiculous psychological explanation for dropping the ball here, like I’m distancing myself from my pretend people so they don’t exhaust my scarce emotional resources. Not real useful creatively, but it sounds like something Trauma Brain would do.[/efn_note] There was a fair bit of cutting and a great deal of revising what remained to correct the tone. When we come back later to fix the “but nothing’s happening” problem, at least the dialogue that survives to join the new material won’t be weirdly discordant.
I had an indecipherable note written sideways along the margin. It was only a few words, so I thought I might be able to crack the code. I puzzled out “in/m?___dental you(r?) ot____ so/go?” before I gave up. My-eyes-only notes are always a hybrid print-cursive that’s not going to win any penmanship awards[efn_note]Oh, how the mighty have fallen since elementary school! In my defense, though, if I had 45 minutes to write the alphabet now, my handwriting might still be worthy of a certificate and a scratch-and-sniff sticker.[/efn_note], but it’s seldom that illegible to my own eye. When I got far enough down the page to notice the arrow pointing to where this mystery phrase was intended to go, it became magically clear that it could mean only “inadvertently or otherwise.” Context is our friend!
The series villain, who has had thousands of years to come up with the deviousest of devious schemes, took the opportunity to twirl a hand at me in order to urge the puny mortal writer to catch up. Yeah yeah, a writer with hundreds of pages of planning documents and 71% of a doorstopper second draft is yammering about being two steps behind a character that exists only in her own imagination. See, Starry-Eyed Writer with Shiny New Idea skips through the empty world flinging handfuls of seeds with carefree abandon. Most of those seeds never sprout because the conditions weren’t right for them to grow. Little birds will flit by later and clean them up. But a lot of those seeds will set roots, boing right up, and get to puttin’ forth fruits and allergies. Thing is, once you have root systems and mulch and shade and critters moving in, the environment changes, and one little seed that looked like a nonstarter belatedly takes off, vines exploding everywhere, wrapping around everything, taking over the whole joint. Happens all the time, so I’m confident everything I need exists as a possibility, somewhere in the reams of material I’ve already generated. I just need something around it to shift a little bit so it can spring forth and be super obviously the answer that was there the entire time, as you can see by the fact that I created the ideal conditions for it from the beginning. *nods sagely* Anyhoo, there was a little bit of an “oh, is that what’s going on” moment for the person making everything up.
In the housekeeping post, I mentioned the contemporary romances shared a common element of people blaming themselves for terrible things someone else did and theorized that I had gotten that out of my system with the third one. Whew, what a relief to be done dumping my personal baggage all over the concourse! This book is about a character who, as a child, took responsibility for solving problems it was absolutely not a child’s responsibility to solve and now risks her life to solve problems that have nothing to do with her because nobody with the authority to solve them is inclined to do so! Oh. Huh. Will you look at that. *weak laughter*
Up Next: The resumption of important business—specifically, being probably-eaten by a dragon, as one does.