jere7my | Book update

Writing hasn't been going well since I finished chapter 3, but it's chugging along more or less smoothly now. Still uphill, but I have traction.

I had a lot of trouble starting chapter 4. There were three things the first scene had to do, and I couldn't make them transition into each other. Eventually, I figured out that I was writing them in the wrong order—get bearings, weird thing, mundane thing instead of weird thing, get bearings, mundane thing. In retrospect, the latter pattern is obvious—the weird thing should happen before Scrutiny gets his bearings, so it can be weird and blurry and disorienting—but it took me a long time to realize it.

Then, mundane thing stopped me like a tar pit. I think I've figured out why; I'm introducing a new character (Futh Hë), and was assuming I knew enough about him because he's been around since the very first drafts, but I don't think I did. He wasn't talking right, and didn't really know what he was supposed to say about things. The scene is exposition-dense, too, and it happens in pitch darkness, and there are a lot of emotional shifts that have to happen with the right rhythm...hm. Putting it that way, I maybe shouldn't have been surprised that this scene was technically challenging for me.

Anyway, I worked through the conversation in bed last night, and wrote two pages tonight, said pages being pages I'm pretty happy with. There's less doom, doom, doom, also you suck tolling in my ears. The scene should end in another page or so, and then I get to write a nice, sensation-rich, internal-conflict scene, which (knock wood) shouldn't make me bang my head against too many walls. (Also, I get to use the word "strigil.")