First: Happy Canada Day to you Canadians.<\/p>\n
Second:\u00a0\u00a0 This may make you laugh.\u00a0 It did me.\u00a0\u00a0 Critical scene–critical in terms of reader spatial orientation as well as reader “what’s happening” orientation.<\/p>\n
And I got both direction (east v. west) and possibility wrong.\u00a0\u00a0 It was a plot bomb, and I was writing as fast as I could, but still!\u00a0 East is east and west is west and if you go the wrong way you end up in the wrong place.\u00a0\u00a0 And one little three-letter word (“not”)\u00a0 makes a huge<\/em> difference.<\/p>\n It’s a reminder to me that every single word of the (now 165,000+ words has to be checked and rechecked and re-rechecked.\u00a0 Not only could I get them wrong in the first place (UGH!) but every change I make affects everything around it (and often things several chapters away.)\u00a0 That fix was easy, this morning–oops, reversed directions, left out a word–but even so the new reading changed the sound of the sentences they were\u00a0 in and and required a “voice check” to see if there were now unwanted sound-things (rhymes, assonance, echoes,\u00a0 etc.\u00a0\u00a0 Should be intentional,\u00a0 if there.)<\/p>\n July has started.\u00a0\u00a0 There’s rain within fifty miles of us but no rain here.\u00a0 The clouds, however, are keeping us below 100F, and we can smell dampness on the wind.\u00a0 That’s a goodness.<\/p>\n I have necessary POV sections (important to the overall story arc, definitely belong) that are not reading smoothly where they are.\u00a0 Can’t quite figure out where to put them, either.\u00a0\u00a0 I suspect this means I need to write some additional connective tissue.\u00a0\u00a0 That’s for the next pass.\u00a0 I have one POV section that may or may not end up in the book:\u00a0 the character is a major plot-mover but distant right now (acting through others, with whom one or more main characters come in contact.)\u00a0 I needed to do the POV section to understand the character’s motivation, but it may not be necessary for readers in this book.\u00a0 It’s a Richelieu situation–you don’t see a lot of him in The Three Musketeers<\/em> but he generates plot.<\/p>\n I think I’ll stop for lunch.\u00a0 Then it’s back to work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" First: Happy Canada Day to you Canadians. Second:\u00a0\u00a0 This may make you laugh.\u00a0 It did me.\u00a0\u00a0 Critical scene–critical in terms of reader spatial orientation as well as reader “what’s happening” orientation. And I got both direction (east v. west) and possibility wrong.\u00a0\u00a0 It was a plot bomb, and I was writing as fast as I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45,5],"tags":[11,20,51,107],"class_list":["post-318","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-revisions","category-the-writing-life","tag-mistakes","tag-progress-report","tag-revision","tag-the-writing-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=318"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":319,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318\/revisions\/319"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=318"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=318"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=318"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}