Well, squiders, I started this blog post three days ago, and then we got two feet of snow, which apparently not only shut down school and work and all that jazz, but also my brain and my productivity.
Digging ourselves out, both literally and figuratively.
I’m in Act 3 of my revision for Book 1 of the trilogy now, which I expected to go fairly smoothly–it does need a new scene, and there’s a point of view issue in one chapter that needs to be fixed (I switched a scene from one POV to the other and did a bad job cleaning it up)–but I was wrong.
Oh, goodness, was I wrong.
I’m on, I want to say, the fourth major revision of this particular story. Originally at the end of Act 2, one of my viewpoint characters dropped out and we didn’t get his again until the very end of the book. With the last revision, I did a major overhaul on this character and added his viewpoint into Act 3. But in general, the structure of Act 3 has remained the same since the second draft (and to be fair, the first draft was so bad and so distant from the current drafts it maybe should not count).
I’ve run into a couple of issues I was not expecting.
The first is that because the structure essentially has not changed, the writing is old. I suspect I didn’t do much re-writing the last go around (aside from POV switching) which makes the writing in this section about ten years old. Awesome.
The second is that the changes I made in Act 1 has made it so the book has alternated viewpoints each chapter perfectly. No character bunching. Until now. And part of me is like, well, if I just add in one more chapter, I can fix this and the POV switching will be perfect until the end of the book.
(Books 2 and 3 are, if I recall, all over the place with POV, but that is a problem for future!Kit.)
Now, of course, one should not put in a chapter just to have a POV pattern, but I do think I have stuff I can put into it that would be interesting and useful. Of course, I also need to spend some time brainstorming, and with everyone home I’m finding it a little hard to think, but I think I shall lock myself in a room in a bit.
Then, of course, there are the problems I was expecting. I did figure out a few days ago where to put the new scene (and how to rearrange some of the existing chapters, viewpoint wise, because the next…three chapters are very long and could probably be broken up a bit), and the viewpoint issue in that rewritten chapter with the POV change should be pretty straightforward too.
I’m pretty sure I went into this revision thinking all the problems were at the beginning. And maybe it wasn’t until I fixed those issues that these at the end became apparent.
Oh well. On we blindly stumble. I am almost done and I cannot wait.
See you next week, squiders.
