I ordered myself a $50 treat (a year’s supply of tea) with my “sorry we got caught ripping you off for years, here’s a sliver of your money back” class action settlement. It was delivered somewhere else, which I know because I was doing yardwork that whole day, had my eye out for the truck so I could spare the driver the choice of doors, and was baffled to come inside and see an email stating that an invisible truck had delivered my invisible package 40 minutes earlier. No neighbor walked it over. No resident of a similar address at greater remove called the delivery company to initiate a do-over. The seller’s response was “Tracking says it was delivered. Fuck you, tea thief. We see through your ruse.” They may very well file a claim with the shipping company and get an extra $50 in their pocket, but they’re not going to use it to send me replacement tea. I hope whoever got my box is at least drinking my money and didn’t throw it in the trash.[efn_note]Maybe this money is cursed. It was stolen from me, I recovered some of it years later, and it was promptly stolen again. I wonder if it hates me in particular or seeks to be free of all masters…[/efn_note]
And the moral of the story is “Treating myself only leads to stress, tears, and regret, so never do that again.”[efn_note]Can’t wait to share this breakthrough with my therapist![/efn_note]
198 rough draft pages have become 319 revised pages. Word count is now just over 150,000. If I didn’t add another word to the remaining pages, this draft would come in right around my guess of 170,000. Since that’s not gonna happen, we’re going over, and that’s fine because there’ll be plenty to carve into any shape I want in subsequent drafts.
In anticipation of work that needs to be done in the next draft, I’ll occasionally cast around for anything that might be of use.[efn_note]Last time I used synastry! ETA: It was not, in fact, last time. I wrote two books between that one and this one, one of which made it to publication before sinking into the abyss to be forgotten by even its creator.[/efn_note] I ended up at the Big Five Project’s Personality Test, which I completed on behalf of Heroine and Hero. They are both extremely conscientious! They’re on opposite sides of the midpoint on both openness and extroversion, but not wildly divided. And then we get the fun scores: 5 vs. 89 on agreeableness (Heroine kills people for a living, so it’s no surprise Hero has the more pleasant nature) and 16 vs. 93 on neuroticism (Heroine keeps her cool even in stressful situations, while Hero is a big ol’ sack of anxiety and misplaced guilt). This doesn’t give me anything new to work with, but it validates what I’ve already done. Being eye-to-eye on three axes and polar opposites on the other two is a good combo of relationship lube and friction.
I also stumbled upon the Clifton Strengths. Lol no, I didn’t pay to take a totally-not-a-personality-test[efn_note]This is corporate astrology. As we speak, some mediocre candidate is being hired/promoted over much more qualified people because a lousy manager is horny for a high XYZ score—or is using that as an excuse to suppress those much more qualified people because the real motivation would open the company to lawsuits. These things are fine as a tool for self-reflection (same with astrology, and neither should be swallowed whole), but the minute someone else asks for your “score,” it’s being weaponized.[/efn_note], but I collected a nice set of behaviors to add to the character factory. It wasn’t vibing as a tool for this story, but for future use, I’m interested in what it does with villains, since all its attributes are framed as strengths. The thing about shitty people is they have to be able to win over somebody, or they have no power. Yeah, you can skip right to the part where they’ve already built their evil empire and handwave how they got there, but the “how” would inform their present action, as well.
All the treachery that Heroine was prepared for in Big City I, her enemy’s stronghold, is actually going to occur in Big City II, where she has underestimated her enemy’s entrenchment. Being wrong is the slingshot that’s going to send her flying into most of the trouble for the remainder of the story. She came to her conclusions in a perfectly logical fashion! But some of the things she used to know became obsolete while she was a swamp hobo, and though she sometimes worries emotion will cloud her judgment, she’s overconfident in the clarifying properties of saying “I don’t care” when she demonstrably does. She spent the last 80% of the book figuring things out with her head, and now the limitations of that method will force her to trust her heart—and the partner she didn’t want at the beginning of the book.
I had an opportunity to deploy a satisfying level of subtext. Two characters with an off-page dispute regarding Heroine continue it in her presence in a way that makes her think the argument started when she showed up. In the first draft, that was the case—one character was an asshole about Heroine’s purpose in the present moment while the other was a good person going along with a shitty thing (that began prior to Heroine’s arrival) out of desperation. The latter remains a good person going along with a shitty thing out of desperation, but the former has become a good person who objects to doing the shitty thing even out of desperation[efn_note]Which, frankly, makes more sense to me than couples with (allegedly) wildly opposing values being in a relationship voluntarily. Grumpy-sunshine is fine. That’s an outward-presentation issue. A grump can be kind. But a person who says “We have to save those drowning orphans!” and a person who sent the orphans out on the lake in a leaky boat to get rid of them would mutually detest one another and wouldn’t be together outside of some form of societal mandate. Unless the one loudly proclaiming an orphan-saving desire to impress bystanders drilled the hole in the boat and arranged the orphans’ outing at the lake, in which case those two lovebirds are in fact attuned and will have a long and happy union. 🥰[/efn_note] and is behaving in an assholish manner to make his objection clear to his partner and to attempt to warn Heroine without making the desperate situation worse.
At the beginning of every scene in which Heroine walks into somebody else’s space, I have a note: WHAT ARE THEY DOING? Because there’s a tendency to treat non-main characters as though they’re lying around like puppets waiting for the protagonist to come in and start moving them around. Technically, that’s exactly what they are (bearing in mind the protagonist is the puppet of the author, at whose bidding all the strings are pulled), but within the story, ideally, there’s an illusion they’re actual people with lives that continue when the POV character isn’t watching. On the most basic level, they should be engaged in some activity that is interrupted by the protagonist’s arrival. (Bonus point if they don’t instantly drop it to make the protagonist’s priority their own.) But if there’s also an opportunity (there isn’t always) to show a bit more of a life in the form of something that occurred more distantly in the past than immediately before the protagonist’s arrival, use it. Don’t bang on about it at length because this isn’t that side character’s story, but a sentence or two can give them more depth than a puppet.
What kind of mood are they in as a result of the life they were living before the protagonist sashayed into it? Is it bad? Is it good and about to be spoiled by the MC? Neither will make them amenable to helping. Or will they actually be pleased to see the MC? If they’re glum enough for the MC to note the mood lightening, will she pry and get involved in their problems or remain fixated on her own? You don’t want the story to devolve into endless side quests (which probably has something to do with why encounters skew toward oppositional), but if it’s possible to link a seemingly random favor for an ally to the big plot in a meaningful way, it would be a waste not to.
My endless search for greater depth.
At long last, we meet the This Book Antagonist, who has been a constant presence in the form of her henchfolk and Heroine’s knowledge of her while they try to figure out what her game is in relation to the Series Antagonist. I think she’s first introduced by one of the henches saying “come home, she’s been like a mother to you” and Heroine concluding his plan is to incapacitate her with laughter. Though she’s never described as striding around in all black leather with a black cape swooshing behind her like a femme Darth Vader, it works for me if that’s the conclusion readers draw. Because now I get to play with perceptions!
Heroine was in the “care” of this woman since 8 years of age, so she has lingering childish impressions of her being larger than life. Heroine became this woman’s lieutenant, and while she knows she was never considered an “equal,” she thought she was close enough to a peer to be in this woman’s innermost circle as a trusted confidant. Heroine knows her mentor isn’t a good person—they’ve had clashes of values before—but she’s far from a saint herself and has to respect the intelligence and ruthless competence, if nothing else.
And then this woman spent the past half year making it very difficult for Heroine to remain alive.
There’s a lot of personal baggage there in the forefront, distracting Heroine from details she would notice right away were the villain anyone else. Now that I finally have the two of them face to face, I can confront Heroine with an inescapable reminder she’s out of the loop now, was probably never as far in the loop as she believed, and needs to climb on top of that pile of baggage to get a clearer look at the present situation. I had only two people in a small, enclosed space to work with, so demolishing Heroine’s expectations took some creative work. In the next revision round, I’ll have to feather in more of what those expectations are for the benefit of readers who don’t supply their own Sherriff of Nottingham notions for me to disabuse. I should probably also look for some compare/contrast points with Heroine. I worry about taking too heavy a hand with that, but anything can be cut later, right?
AND it’s a timely reminder that if someone she’s known for two decades can turn on her with no obvious warning, maybe she should be a little more wary of this dude she just met, a known liar who admitted trying to cozy up to her as a manipulative tactic, with whom she has subsequently become quite cozy. Everything she didn’t want at the beginning of the book has come to pass, starting when he showed up, so getting all dewy-eyed about their relationship suddenly seems a touch unwise. He hasn’t earned the cut direct, but it’s only a matter of time. Eyes open, shields up, baby.
Oh, and the desperate character noted above needed a name, which I provided, only to notice in the next scene it’s one letter off from another character’s name, which is probably why it was so easy to come up with a name for a change! Now the desperate character noted above needs a new name, but that’s going to be a problem for Future Me. Perhaps she will have tea to sustain her through the ordeal.