Happy Tuesday, squiders! It’s still been hard to move out of the mindset of the leadership training and move on to other things, but I have started rolling on the revision for World’s Edge.
I spent some time on Saturday looking at the problems I’d identified from my initial readthrough (which I think I went over here, but let me know if not) and thinking about how to fix them.
The fixes boiled down to:
- Maps – for my own edification and to make sure worldbuilding is consistent. Specifically a map of the Hope and all three of its decks, the path the Hope takes from Altruia across the ocean (including all islands and major magical storm), and the path Rae and Sol/Ead/Marit take on land once they get to the other side. Also considering making Rae’s map, which is the ancient one she’s using for navigation. So I know what she’s working off of. Oh, and Altruia. Altruia has a lot more forest in this time period (compared to the Trilogy time period) and the Republic hasn’t formed yet, so it will be good to know where the humans are concentrated at this point of time.
- Emotional arcs – the bare bones are there but they could use some expansion. Marit, who is our viewpoint character, has just gone through a pretty traumatic time before the start of the story, and her internal arc needs to follow the fallout of said trauma and as she heals from it. In addition, Rae (who is the protagonist character) and Sol also have traumatic pasts that they’re dealing with that are essential to the main plot. I bought the The Emotional Wound Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide to Psychological Trauma book, which is from the Emotion Thesaurus people (a lovely resource), and read through their explanation of emotional trauma at the beginning, which was very helpful.
- Clear outline of plot, subplots, arcs, and major plot points – Once I know my emotional arcs I can finalize my plots and all that jazz. Also going to do a couple of the target exercises from Holly Lisle’s (may she rest in peace) revision classes, such as the ones about theme.
- Chapter list with emphasis on plots/subplots – I made one of these for Book 1, looking at each chapter and what it currently entailed (and where, if anywhere, it was in terms of the three major subplots), and then made notes on changes. It was super helpful, and I’m going to try it again.
And then I broke those all down into steps and made a schedule. We have a critique meeting at the end of the month and I’d like to have the first two chapters ready to go for that, but we will see. I will be gone all weekend (Thurs-Sun) for the second half of the leadership training and I do need to pack and finish making my staff presents (30 of them, and I’m at 23), plus normal life responsibilities and all that jazz.
Yesterday I spent time working on the emotional arcs. I went through the Emotional Wound thesaurus and also looked at the Needs Pyramid (which the book references, and is actually a really logical way at looking at emotional arcs), and then wrote out Marit’s, Rae’s, and Sol’s specific traumas (and wrote out Marit’s arc. Rae/Sol have smaller arcs because they’ve been dealing with their crap for a lot longer and have all their delusions/coping mechanisms firmly in place). And then, because I was on a roll, I did Ead and Viri too, to a lesser degree.
(Character introduction in case you don’t remember who people are)
Next step is to do the target exercises for theme and overall plot, and then write out the tentpoles for all the plots, subplots, arcs, and assorted sundry.
And THEN I’m going to read back through the manuscript, make the chapter list (and notes), and work on the maps as makes sense. Altruia and potentially Rae’s map I can do before the readthrough, but the path map and the ship map and all that makes sense to work on as we go through the story, so we can build off what exists (and make changes as necessary).
From there I can start the actual revision, unless this process exposes something else that needs changing and then we’ll need to fix that too.
If I don’t get through the prep work in time to send stuff to the critique group, well, I can still do a surface level clean-up and send it out, and then makes their suggested changes when I go back through.
Anyway, I’m excited! I really enjoy this story and I’m looking forward to making it even better than it is now.
