State of the Revisions
Mar. 3rd, 2012 08:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hrjWow, have I really not posted anything since the Culinary Symposium? There's a movie review I want to do, and it's time to start nattering about what I'm doing with the yard, but for now, here's a writing update.
The creation of necessary names, vocabulary, and quoted literature is nearly done. I have a couple of university professors who need names, but that's the last of it. I'm about halfway through the first detail-editing pass through Daughter of Mystery. This is the one that includes significant re-ordering of certain scenes, expansion of some promissory text, and just general rewriting. The scene re-ordering was primarily driven by pinning down some calendar related issues, especially the academic schedule of my invented university. But there were also some seasonal issues: a scene that I wanted to happen on an outsider terrace that was much better placed in May than February!
One of the interesting things about the "promissory notes" for additional scenes or description is finding out how many of them don't actually need to be done. Maybe the lack of a free-flowing scene in my initial writing was A Sign, or maybe the absence of the desired text meant I filled the need differently going forward. At any rate, a lot of these items have been dispensed with trivially.
The biggest thing I'm dealing with in this pass is the simple fact that my understanding of my characters changed over the course of the story, and since I was working under a rule of "no re-writing until it's all done" the most I'd managed to do about that was insert some notes on sections that I knew would need to be fixed. So I'm tweaking a lot of inter-character interactions because they no longer fit the big picture. Margerit's cousin Nikule is now much more awkward and clueless than angry and threatening. The personalities of her two aunts have been made more consistent (since I occasionally forgot which one of them was supposed to have which characteristics). I may give some special attention to the character of Antuniet (the sister of my villain) because it turns out she gets to be a protagonist in the sequel.
Oh, yes. I've started writing the sequel. Working title The Mystic Marriage in reference to the significance of alchemy in the plot, plus a thematic continuation of the title elements from Daughter of Mystery. But never fear, despite the traditional symbolic connotations of the phrase, Book 2 will continue in the genre of lesbian alternate-historical romance. As I did at the start of DoM, I have a couple of emotionally significant scenes in mind, a very vague general story arc, a notion of what my characters want and that they're going to be successful, but not how they'll accomplish it. (In my head, there is also a Book 3, which has the working title of Alma Mater, but other than my continuing characters I'm not sure whose story it's going to be.)
The new writing isn't taking attention away from the re-write -- given my peculiar working habits, the two fall in complementary distribution in my schedule. And it helps keep up the excitement for the project in general to have new story emerging.
The creation of necessary names, vocabulary, and quoted literature is nearly done. I have a couple of university professors who need names, but that's the last of it. I'm about halfway through the first detail-editing pass through Daughter of Mystery. This is the one that includes significant re-ordering of certain scenes, expansion of some promissory text, and just general rewriting. The scene re-ordering was primarily driven by pinning down some calendar related issues, especially the academic schedule of my invented university. But there were also some seasonal issues: a scene that I wanted to happen on an outsider terrace that was much better placed in May than February!
One of the interesting things about the "promissory notes" for additional scenes or description is finding out how many of them don't actually need to be done. Maybe the lack of a free-flowing scene in my initial writing was A Sign, or maybe the absence of the desired text meant I filled the need differently going forward. At any rate, a lot of these items have been dispensed with trivially.
The biggest thing I'm dealing with in this pass is the simple fact that my understanding of my characters changed over the course of the story, and since I was working under a rule of "no re-writing until it's all done" the most I'd managed to do about that was insert some notes on sections that I knew would need to be fixed. So I'm tweaking a lot of inter-character interactions because they no longer fit the big picture. Margerit's cousin Nikule is now much more awkward and clueless than angry and threatening. The personalities of her two aunts have been made more consistent (since I occasionally forgot which one of them was supposed to have which characteristics). I may give some special attention to the character of Antuniet (the sister of my villain) because it turns out she gets to be a protagonist in the sequel.
Oh, yes. I've started writing the sequel. Working title The Mystic Marriage in reference to the significance of alchemy in the plot, plus a thematic continuation of the title elements from Daughter of Mystery. But never fear, despite the traditional symbolic connotations of the phrase, Book 2 will continue in the genre of lesbian alternate-historical romance. As I did at the start of DoM, I have a couple of emotionally significant scenes in mind, a very vague general story arc, a notion of what my characters want and that they're going to be successful, but not how they'll accomplish it. (In my head, there is also a Book 3, which has the working title of Alma Mater, but other than my continuing characters I'm not sure whose story it's going to be.)
The new writing isn't taking attention away from the re-write -- given my peculiar working habits, the two fall in complementary distribution in my schedule. And it helps keep up the excitement for the project in general to have new story emerging.
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Date: 2012-03-03 06:11 pm (UTC)