Recent Writing...

With all the adjustments to how the court is run, things have been inordinately busy at work of late. So much so I have been a bit tired and distracted when I get home, so the blogging has suffered a bit. So, here's what I've been up to...

I have been ideating quite a bit on A Friend To The Watch, and laid down the prologue over the last few days. I continue to tweak it, wanting to get it just right.

You see, seven years ago I had an image enter and refuse to leave my head: A man and a boy are talking over a winter grave, each refusing to understand the other. Both are equally sure they knew the wishes of the dead woman at their feet better than the other.

A year later I started writing A Friend To The Watch. I finished it two years later. My agent shopped it. It failed, a flawed but promising first effort. I put it aside and concentrated on The Last Captain. That's done, and the sequel is also nearing completion, but I can't get the kid and the man over the grave out of my head until I write it...

I am not doing a re-write. At least, not as I understand re-writes. I am not referring at all to the original novel (150,ooo words or so), just using the situations and characters in my head to formulate an entirely new, and hopefully successful tale.

So, to it I go.

Immediacy

As my faithful few know, I have been doing the re-write on The Last Captain. I had some great input I have tried to put into practice. I think it's working quite nicely.

I had a ton of POV characters in the draft I sent off to Baen. In my hubris, I thought I had given each of these POV characters a significant voice all their own, all within sections as short as five hundred or less words. The sections followed one another at a very rapid clip, requiring the reader to switch horses with great frequency.

As it turns out, I am not a virtuoso, just a cat trying to break in.

So.

I am hacking the number of POV characters down to three, and giving each a chapter before moving to the next POV character. I hope to cut down on reader whiplash by doing this, as well as go a little deeper with each character as I do so.

That latter bit was also part of the input I had from my reader, who wanted to feel more of the internal strife between the controlled behavior of the officers and their actual internal emotion and thoughts (See any of my Inner Gorilla posts for what I am talking about.).

All this requires some new material, but not as much as I had feared, given that I know where everyone stands, and what is going on. Now to convey that in a more efficient and, hopefully, visceral manner.

Plenty of time to learn to be that virtuoso.

And to practice I go.

Breaking 9o,ooo Words

Just some catching up:

Finally, finally nearing the end of the climax of The Last Captain.  Lots o' blood bein' spilt, and humpty dumpty won't ever be put back together again, at least until the sequel, and then he won't be recognizable.



Talked to one of my buddies from Geneva today, and he had some solid points to make about the early draft.  He picked up on the some of the character's flaws and foibles, which is a very hopeful thing. It is nice to know my attempts at clever reveals for some of the reasons my characters act as they do, are being read as flaws of the character, rather than flaws in the writing.

I'm very happy to be off today, my wife's birthday.  She liked her gifts and cards, and is in for a suprise tonight.