Just a quick post before I turn in and try to catch up on the sleep that I didn’t get last night (insomnia sucks).
I’m entering a very difficult part of the revision for Mercenary Savior. I’m a little more than a third of the way through the story (as you can tell from the status bar to your right), which is usually where my writing starts to get iffy.
Up until now, most of the work has to do with revising or rewriting individual scenes. That’s no too difficult; it’s very easy, for me at least, to focus on the page itself and fixing problems on the sentence and paragraph level.
The problem now, though, is that some of the chapters aren’t working as coherent units. Some of them feel slapped together, as if scenes that don’t really have much in common have been thrown in the same chapter merely because I didn’t know where else to put them. That doesn’t make for good chapters.
So now, I need to take a few steps back from the page and look at the forest instead of the trees. I need to figure out which events need to be clustered into which chapters, in order for the scenes to resonate with each other and build up to the climax without bumbling on each others’ toes.
I’m going to try out a few new tools to help with the plotting, most notably Dan Well’s 7 point system. I’ve already worked out the essential plot points for about a dozen of the conflicts in the story; now I just need to see which ones go in which chapter.
I wish I had time to use it now, but dagnabit, it’s 1:30 in the morning, and I have to get up at 7:00 tomorrow. Dang. Well, at least I have work–and it’s good work for an aspiring writer in my position. More on that in a later post.
Anyway, good night.
