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Alpennia: The end of the beginning
Oct. 9th, 2013 09:26 pmThis evening, I e-mailed the final final final version of Daughter of Mystery off to the production people at Bella Books. So now I settle in to be patient for the three months before it's actually available to readers. To all my test-readers and commenters, thank you all for your help and encouragement (you also get thanked in the book), and rest assured that you still get the chance to read it as a new book, because the published text is at least somewhat different from any version anyone else has read. (This is, of course, one of the down sides of being a test reader: you don't get to read the "real" version completely fresh.)
I've plunged back into working on The Mystic Marriage now. Step one was to review the existing text and start identifying places that could use the same sort of revisions I just finished adding to DoM. In particular, I looked very critically at my use (or lack thereof) of physical description of the major characters and marked logical opportunities to add more. I've also drawn up a short list of characters newly introduced in MM (or continuing characters who weren't important enough for a physical description in DoM) for which I need to hunt down appropriate physical models.
I have also come to the conclusion that it was not plausible to get the rest of the necessary plot and romantic arc squeezed into 12 chapters and 3 months of story time. And yet elements that had originally been intended for the concluding chapter need to happen at the New Year's Court. So after playing around with possible alternative timelines, I've aligned the middle of the remaining romantic arc with New Years. (My romantic protagonists finally end up in bed around the beginning of September. Previously I needed them to enjoy an initial honeymoon period, become cranky about certain incompatabilites, have a major fight, get back together, do their best to work things out without really communicating much, have a serious soul-baring self-sacrificing encounter that clears the air, move in together, and settle in to a comfortable long haul ... all before the beginning of January. Yeah, nope. So it may still be implausibly compressed, but I'm only going to get them as far as the soul-baring encounter by New Years and leave the moving in and getting comfortable for after that. Which requires me to also move some other plot elements later (because they're in part triggered by the moving in). Which actually leaves a lot more breathing space because otherwise I was going to have a simultaneous wrapping up of the Romance, the Politics, the Secret Plot, the Family Drama, the Scientific Achievement, and the Monomaniacal Quest all in the space of a couple of weeks of story-time, along with sprinkling of Seeds Planted for the Next Book. Now I can avoid crowding the Scientific Achievement quite so much in November, move the Secret Plot and the Politics into mid/late January, elaborate the resolution of the Family Drama a bit more, and finish it all off with a much more solid context/motivation for fulfilling the Monomaniacal Quest as the final chapter sometime in late February, with the Next Book Seeds sprinkled a bit more evenly throughout. And it ends up being 16 chapters rather than 12.
At this point, those 16 remaining chapters are fairly solidly outlined (a difference from when I was at a similar point in Daughter of Mystery) and I'm working on solidifying the "menu" for each chapter by organizing the order of the various event occurring in each one and reviewing all my major characters and making sure that their story threads have the appropriate continuity and "presence" so it doesn't feel like I lost track and dropped anyone.
And just to add to the complication, I've started formally sketching out the major story threads for Book 3 (title still wavering between Alma Mater and Mother of Souls) and have identified several key plot points that need to be anchored more solidly (but quietly) in Mystic Marriage. In the process, I have discovered that I was mistaken about the eventual fate of Margerit's young cousin Iulien, and may have learned exactly which choice Antuniet's apprentice Anna will eventually make. But neither of those items will come about until Books 4 and 5 (or, if you count the 15th century pre-quel in writing sequence, Books 5 and 6). Why yes, I do believe I'll be staying a while in Alpennia.
I've plunged back into working on The Mystic Marriage now. Step one was to review the existing text and start identifying places that could use the same sort of revisions I just finished adding to DoM. In particular, I looked very critically at my use (or lack thereof) of physical description of the major characters and marked logical opportunities to add more. I've also drawn up a short list of characters newly introduced in MM (or continuing characters who weren't important enough for a physical description in DoM) for which I need to hunt down appropriate physical models.
I have also come to the conclusion that it was not plausible to get the rest of the necessary plot and romantic arc squeezed into 12 chapters and 3 months of story time. And yet elements that had originally been intended for the concluding chapter need to happen at the New Year's Court. So after playing around with possible alternative timelines, I've aligned the middle of the remaining romantic arc with New Years. (My romantic protagonists finally end up in bed around the beginning of September. Previously I needed them to enjoy an initial honeymoon period, become cranky about certain incompatabilites, have a major fight, get back together, do their best to work things out without really communicating much, have a serious soul-baring self-sacrificing encounter that clears the air, move in together, and settle in to a comfortable long haul ... all before the beginning of January. Yeah, nope. So it may still be implausibly compressed, but I'm only going to get them as far as the soul-baring encounter by New Years and leave the moving in and getting comfortable for after that. Which requires me to also move some other plot elements later (because they're in part triggered by the moving in). Which actually leaves a lot more breathing space because otherwise I was going to have a simultaneous wrapping up of the Romance, the Politics, the Secret Plot, the Family Drama, the Scientific Achievement, and the Monomaniacal Quest all in the space of a couple of weeks of story-time, along with sprinkling of Seeds Planted for the Next Book. Now I can avoid crowding the Scientific Achievement quite so much in November, move the Secret Plot and the Politics into mid/late January, elaborate the resolution of the Family Drama a bit more, and finish it all off with a much more solid context/motivation for fulfilling the Monomaniacal Quest as the final chapter sometime in late February, with the Next Book Seeds sprinkled a bit more evenly throughout. And it ends up being 16 chapters rather than 12.
At this point, those 16 remaining chapters are fairly solidly outlined (a difference from when I was at a similar point in Daughter of Mystery) and I'm working on solidifying the "menu" for each chapter by organizing the order of the various event occurring in each one and reviewing all my major characters and making sure that their story threads have the appropriate continuity and "presence" so it doesn't feel like I lost track and dropped anyone.
And just to add to the complication, I've started formally sketching out the major story threads for Book 3 (title still wavering between Alma Mater and Mother of Souls) and have identified several key plot points that need to be anchored more solidly (but quietly) in Mystic Marriage. In the process, I have discovered that I was mistaken about the eventual fate of Margerit's young cousin Iulien, and may have learned exactly which choice Antuniet's apprentice Anna will eventually make. But neither of those items will come about until Books 4 and 5 (or, if you count the 15th century pre-quel in writing sequence, Books 5 and 6). Why yes, I do believe I'll be staying a while in Alpennia.
