Night before last, I got 2 hours of sleep. So it would be easier to take a nap if the opportunity presented, I didn’t take any of the caffeine I use to self-medicate the ADHD. I stole about 2 more hours during the day[efn_note]The floor is perfectly comfortable when the divine hand of Fatigue is smashing you flat and there’s no other option available![/efn_note] and went to bed last night really early… and then woke up 2 hours later with the kind of headache that feels like your brain is on a mission to swell until your skull explodes in a gooey burst of bony shrapnel, the kind of headache you’d be completely unsurprised if the diagnosis was meningitis or aneurysm because something is Obviously Seriously Wrong inside your brain bucket.
PRO TIP: There’s a penalty for completely skipping the addictive adenosine antagonist that controls the blood supply to your brain. On occasions when the full dose isn’t practical, maybe take a little bit rather than none and spare yourself several hours of “this is how I die” in the middle of the night until the feeble over-the-counter anti-inflammatories kick in.
The second of the road trip’s aforementioned near-death experiences, this one a direct result of Hero’s actions, leaves Heroine vowing to make him famous for his “empty melon of a head” if he succeeds in getting himself killed. She’s been fairly chill about the weird situation up to this point, but his self-sacrificial “heroism” is the thing that sets her off. This will be a pattern. She will grudgingly come to accept this lamentable aspect of his character.
The synopsis contains the mystifying words “recognizes the RVO of a manipulator.” Past Me thought the meaning of RVO would be obvious. Past Me overestimated the intuitive ability of Present Me at 3:43 a.m. Couldn’t figure it out, resigned myself to Past Me’s genius being lost to time, and switched over to the manuscript, where it was glaringly apparent RVO stands for the “reverse victim & offender” portion of DARVO.
Context: Ain’t It Grand?
And then, of course, I cut most of that interaction because it doesn’t work with Hero’s belated character development. He’s no longer the helpless waif Heroine thinks is only playing the role of a helpless waif. While I’m fine with her reading abuse into actually innocuous behavior, I’m not fine at all with him engaging in actually abusive behavior. Got a nice pit o’ lava in my lair reserved for abusive “romance” “heroes.” I mean a nice HOT SPRING, very exclusive, VIPs only, here’s a towel and complimentary beverage, step right in and purge the toxins from your pores.
Lots of trimming and rearranging bits of conversation that obviously weren’t written as a piece, trying to make them flow from to one to the next. There’s a note in the synopsis that a whole scene might be disposable, but something’s stopping me from chopping this one. I suspect there’s something more important in it than I currently realize. It might be easier to pinpoint if I chucked the lot and ran up against the consequences of the missing One Important Thing, but I don’t trust myself at the present level of revision. Maybe next round, but not with two-thirds of a heavy pass still ahead of me. Or perhaps the thin scene is waiting for something meatier currently placed later to be moved here. What, you expect me to know how something that’s entirely the product of my own mind works? Pffft. You obviously haven’t met my mind.[efn_note]Brain and I are like shackled prisoners who must work together to survive, but at this point it’s safe to say we’re never going to develop the heartwarming friendship promised by the shackled-prisoners-enemies-to-BFFs cinematic genre.[/efn_note]
I wrote “maybe he’d been a buttface on purpose” in my very serious, adult, high-stakes fantasy manuscript because I know what I’m going for but am too sleep-deprived to get there in a reasonable fashion. Voice is hard while the Universe is blowing a trumpet in your ear. The concept gets through, but the execution is butts. Everyone assures me “it will even out in revisions,” which has always previously been the case, but that’s kinda dependent on the problematic situation improving, while odds favor worsening instead.
I had a What If moment about something much later in the book. Wrote it in the revision notebook with the caveat: “Doesn’t have to be TRUE, just something they ponder to give each other nightmares.” But also… there would be a lot of interesting possibilities if it was true, so we’re going to poke that little seed into the dirt and see if it grows into anything later in the series (or apart from it). No harm if it doesn’t because it’s one little seed in a vast landscape and nobody will notice if it doesn’t take, but WHAT IF?
This was the last batch of scenes in the Assessing the Problem portion of the story. Up next is the Damn, Nobody’s Cooperating With Fixing This Problem portion, which will last until maybe 90% on the progress bar. Everyone is in favor of justice, of course—what sort of monster would say otherwise in public?—but it’s terribly inconvenient for everyone who benefits from the injustice to muster any productive form of support for righting it, you see. And so the fate of the cursed[efn_note]I should track when I think “curst” versus “cur-sed” to see if there’s a pattern. It’s definitely the cur-sed kingdom. Cur-sed place. But curst prince, sleepers, and horses and when it stands alone (e.g., “this image is cursed”). If it’s a distinction reserved for geography, what did I watch as a wee bairn that imprinted cur-sed specifically for locations? I can see the case that it was a beginning reader sounding-out-words error (processing the pieces as cur-sed rather than curse-d), but it wouldn’t have stuck this long if some British-sounding orator hadn’t dramatically intoned it.[/efn_note] kingdom rests on the shoulders of a fugitive and a liar.
Fuel an author!