Off his Face

day gentle reader, 

Finally, the dread rewrite of Book 2: The Face of the Goddess  is done … well almost, now it needs a good edit. That's the trouble with a rewrite - it’s really a new draft, the 4th for this book.  As posted earlier, the cumulative word cut I did at the start left me lost for words: 60,000 of them. The rewrite added a few words, quite a few, but not enough, which in and of itself created more problems. 

Face took 10 years to write 2001 (2000-2010), during which the original start slipped to chapter 29.  Chapters 1-28 were the first, deepest cut. The new starting point is the old starting point, with a major rework of the new chapter 1. From there story proceeds as a reader might expect towards the climax predicted in the opening, except it now reaches that point too soon, and leaves the novel too short for a good read. 

 As also mooted in my last post I had the rethink I had to have. 

The ending had to change, so I gave the original climax a twist. (much like killing a hero expected to live.) I had to rewrite everything after that, and make a couple of tweaks leading into it, which made the rewrite longer, (over the allocated year) The extended finale allowed me to further clarify aspects of my imagined world, and set the storyline up for what I know is coming in the already written Book 3: The Arch of Restoration. The new climatic ending brought Face back over 180,000, in line with Break and Arch. 

All good so far? Well no. This rewrite, 25-15 years, and a couple of million words after the first draft amply demonstrate, I write differently now, (better I believe :>) But that concerns me. Given today's preoccupation with AI, some might attribute style differences to artificial enhancements.

I'm now in a quandary whether to edit Bk 2 Face or Bk 3 Arch. I’m tempted to move on to the final book, (which means I will), however the wholesale changes to the storyline made after the original climax, may turn what should have been a simple edit, into another massive rewrite.

 I’m about to find out.

ooroo until my next post, Rob

PS - I often question why I want to write (which is easy), because to get published  the edit/rewrite process (which is hard) is unavoidable, and reminds me of this quote.

"If you want to write fiction, the best thing you can do is take two aspirins, lie down in a dark room, and wait for the feeling to pass." ~ Lawrence Block

 

 

 

    

 

The Plot Thickens

gday gentle reader, 

There’s a reason why my website links to here, reads [occasional blogger.] It's been over a year since my last confession, a year of rewriting as last posted, 

The Face of the Goddess.

As I said I removed 40,000 word from the beginning, several pov chapters from part one and three chapters from the end, which rightly belong in Book III. It dropped from 193,000 to 132,000 words.

On 28/1/2024 (I know, its last year. I'm a slow writer; I have a life.) I began rewriting a couple of deleted pov chapters from a different pov. Some worked some didn’t. Two glaringly obvious old pov chapters remain, I need the information, but couldn’t see how to rework it for another character. It was holding me up; I left it for the next edit and ploughed on. By the time I reached the old ending the story had grown back to 155 K words.

For me writing is so much easier than editing, and in the last month I’ve added 14,000 words but here’s the rub, the extra chapters have now buried the end point goal to which my hero and heroine have been striving. It only dawned on me when saw I was reaching my target word count (180,000) that I now had no end point to work towards, I had already passed the end point.

If I'm thinking, “Why am writing this?” I can easily imagine readers thinking “Why am reading this?”

Time for a rethink.

ooroo until my next post, Rob

The Dread Rewrite

gday gentle reader, 

Now that  The Break of Civilisation  Vol 1 of The Restoration Legends trilogy is out there, both as an eBook and as a trade paperback, I’ve been working on rewriting Vol 2; not just editing but rewriting significant bits.

Originally, that is, way back in 2000 on finishing Vol 1, I ploughed straight into  The Face of the Goddess  Vol 2 writing 50,000 words in a couple of months. 

I kept my trio of POV characters from Break and added two more, a son of one, and a daughter of the other two. Five POV characters, complicated, yes?  

But wait there’s more .....

I always intended each book would be a new generation, so I started roughly 20 years after the events in Vol 1.  But then I, the author, felt I needed to know what happened in between and began filling in the 20-year gap, eventually pushing the story back to where it finished, and adding a 6^th POV character.  Chapter 1 was now Chapter 42, 60,000 words later, half of them (30,000 words) before the heroine, the daughter, is born.

The reason for all the above is attempt to explain why I'm rewriting. I'm trying to recover my original vison. It’s not all bad but I’ve slashed 40,000 words, from the opening, and will reduce the POV characters to the three children. 

All that background material that I needed to know, so I could write with authority I can and will re-use in short stories.

Speaking of which brings me to the just self published (15/12/23) collection  Colony Worlds: 13 of my award winning stories but that  story is for my next blog.

ooroo Rob

The winter of my discontent

 g'day gentle reader

I'm in my seventy fifth year. That's 3/4 gone should I be lucky enough to live to 100.  If you consider 100 a year beginning with spring then I've passed from autumn to the winter of years. So I better get  on with it.

Time to publish the damn trilogy one way or another. As a subscriber to Authors Publish, they send me reviews of publishers 'now accepting' with links to the publishers web sites, often straight to the the submission guidelines. 

The first to intrigue me was CamCat,  so I browsed the quite extensive advice to authors, one of which was  7 Things to do to Your Manuscript Before Submission, 

1. Put your manuscript away

2. Reread your manuscript. Start to finish. Out loud.

I went no further. My magnificent octopus had been sitting in the bottom file of my PC for 3 years. Strike 1,  

I began re-reading out loud - well not exactly - I had word read it aloud to me. I took over 6 months. strike 2.  

Meanwhile  I continued to a short story to WotF each quarter but with less alacrity and it showed; after 8 consecutive successes I missed 2.  I had become re-engaged in the world of my novel. 

After filling in their incredibly detailed application form (which, I have to say was one of the most useful writing exercises I have ever done, I now know what my story is about) I find my book is too big for them. Strike 3 your out.  

So in the end I after 20 plus years in the making and 20 plus rejection I've published my magnificent octopus, 

now available for pre-order.    

https://books2read.com/.../rob-bleckly/subscribe/1/428714/

ooroo Rob

until my next post

Genealogical Consideration

gday gentle reader

Here's another writing project that occupies my time. Writing biographies for long dead ancestors on WikiTree is both rewarding and fascinating. 

  embeddable family tree updated live from WikiTree

One of my next stories will use material discovered in a family closet. The things the people did to their children in "the good old days" would today get them arrested. One of my venerable ancestors shipped a couple his sons to sea for wagging school to attend their sister’s funeral. On of them though twice shipwrecked not only survived but made it Australia where fortunately he thrived. I might ot ever have been born otherwise, a scary thought - for me at least.

As you can see my tree goes back a way. The recently added  ( Siminis / Simonis / Simianis / Simionis BLAKEY) is tenuously linked as my Simon's father  because he had a son Simon Blakey  baptised about the right estimated  DOB. Records in the 1600's often lack detail. 

I hesitate to voice the thought, but like Charles Darwin it appears 

I at least have a Simian ancestor   

Up unto Thomas Bleckly/ BLEAKLY  the record is clear and verifiable as are the next two generation back - as individuals. It's the Links between that are tenuous. They remain in place however until further evidence refutes their presence. It's a work in progress.

Unlike some other online genealogical programs that I shall not mention, they're  unmentionable, who charge annual fees, and then get you to do all the work putting all your ancestor online have the temerity to effectively re-sell your contributions.

WikiTree is FREE.

I love my WikiTree. (https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Bleckly-1) 

ooroo until my next post 

Rob 

The Persistence of Submitting

gday gentle reader

 A story I wrote way back in the last millennium (1993) under the working title Time Loop won an Honorable Mention in L Ron Hubbard's Writers of the Future contest in 4^th quarter 2021.  This is a significant in a couple of ways.

 

First of all, it means I have won and Honorable Mention in every quarter of 2021. It also makes it the 6^th Honorable Mention in a row, 7 out of the last 8. (3 out of  4 in 2020 - 4 out of 4 in 2021) This was also my 18th consecutive quarterly submission and the 12th award BUT three of the 18 are repeat submissions (reedited of course) so in fact I have only sent 15 original stories for 12 awards. 

You may be right in thinking the Covid pandemic has improved my writing/editing. For it certainly the bum's been on the seat for hours longer.

Second of all, this is at least the fourth time I've submitted the story. In the early days I didn’t keep good records of what I sent where, only how much I wrote, trying to fulfil Hemmingway's idea that the first million words are practice. Persistence is everything.

Bear with me gentle reader while I begin at the beginning, a very good place to start I'm told. In 1993 I wrote Time Loop longhand, then typed up my scribble on a portable typewriter and submitted a paper copy, except this never happened. I never submitted a single story before I had a computer able to print a perfect copy, that’s not to say to a perfect story, but a perfect copy of whatever story I had written.

My first 1980 computer, a TRS-80 Model-1, even after expansion from cassette tape storage to 5 ¼ floppy discs couldn’t cope. It wasn’t until 1996 when I opened "Books with Connections" an internet café bookshop in Blackwood with 2 computers I had built to my specification, that I felt it at last worthwhile transcribing Time Loop and my full-filing-cabinet's worth of handwritten stories.

Now let's cut back to the chase. Some current members of the Blackwood Writers Group, (formed in the bookshop that same year, 1996), with long memories will know the story. It was workshopped under the title, The Persistence of Memory. I sent the workshopped story to Eidolon and Altair, probably in 2000, but didn't make the cut.

After my first success submitting to WotF in 2017, I reworked Persistence (it's short title) changing the protagonist source of overnight wealth from shares to crypto currency and sent it to WotF for the 2nd Qtr. 2018. It didn’t rate a mention, honourable or otherwise.

Once more into the breech. The contest coordinator had once suggested previously submitted could be resubmitted. The first time I tried this produced an Honorable Mention and so I did it again with Persistence now retitled Days of Future Passed (from a Dali painting to a Moody Blues album) for the 4th Qtr. 2021 and you know the result, another Honorable Mention.

It sort of validates Robert A. Heinlein’s Rule 5. "You must keep the work on the market until it's sold." (Or wins something)

Ooroo until my next post.  I hope you had a Merry Christmas and lets all hope 2022 is a better new year

 

Rob

PS One may think that because all my posts are about the WotF contest, I don't do anything else. you'd be wrong. but that's another story.   

The story is out there.

gday gentle reader 

I've been experiment with Twitter and story telling but except for the briefest flash fictions, the medium sucks. My much published (online an in print by Antipodean SF) 500 word story "Trojans" took 12 post and had to be massaged, not just to fit, but for each tweet to end on a cliff-hanger so readers would return.

In my considered opinion nobody, not even my 5 Followers, read it. So now I tweet links to stories.

I'm preparing an anthology, titled Colony Worlds, (a theme I like) all Honorable (USA spelling as per certificate) Mentions I've received from my submissions to  

L. Ron Hubbard's
Writers of the Future Contest

I'll begin with the first 2 chapters of The Descent of the Kestrel now up on my website https://www.rob.bleckly.com, with more chapters and further stories to come. Why 2 Chapters? It's told from two alternating POV's (points of view). Constructive Criticism is always welcome, no story is ever so finished it can't be improved.

 The Descent of the Kestrel 

9,300 words written 2011 won me an HM in the 3rd quarter 2017 exactly 20 years after my first HM in the 3rd quarter 1997.

In between I wrote the oft mentioned still unpublished 600,000-word trilogy which obviously improved my skills because 20 years on the competition quality is a lot stiffer, the award categories expanded, and an HM is no longer a finalist.

The story is a prequel, the first of five set in my trilogy world "The Restoration Legends."

Doing this now was promoted by my latest HM, the fourth in a row, which means my Silver Honorable Mention and the Semi-Finalist can be left out of the anthology. As posted earlier these two form the opening and concluding parts of a Novel (yet another colony world) It's the sagging middle part that needs work.

until my next post (might post about why I like writing colony worlds)

ooroo Rob

A Fascination with Numbers

 

gday gentle reader,  

Me and WotF

On further analysis (see my previous post) of my eight (8) award-winning stories over 4 years of consecutive submissions to L. Ron Hubbard's Writers of the Future Contest, I  have yet to get a mention in the second Quarter that runs from January 1 to March 31.

As Spok would say: Fascinating. Is it that I slack off during our southern hemisphere Summer, or does the northern hemisphere Winter put more northern hemisphere bums on writing seats for longer periods? I shall turn up the aircon and try harder this quarter.

Word Counts

And one more fascinating thing about my most recent Silver Honourable Mention The Starbuck Chronicles, but let me digress a moment.  

Back in 1999 I won 2^nd prize in the 1st Aurealis Millennium competition for a story that was and had to be exactly 1000 words not including the title. But wait there's more, most of my early submissions to Antipodean SF, under the mistaken impressions that Ion wanted no more than 500 words, were close to and often exactly 500 words. By now you're starting to get the picture. 

The Starbuck Chronicles,  

my Silver Honourable Mention has exactly 750 words (not including Chapter# and title) in each of its 17 chapters. 

 I am now left to wonder if unbeknown to the judges, the pattern (the rhythm if you will) of the chapters, played part in the win.  Did it lift it up to Silver H M or lower its chances of attaining higher or did it not make a scrap of difference. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the challenge of making a longer story hold together despite the self-imposed artificial strictures.    

 ooroo Rob

Writing Aids & Awards

g'day gentle reader

The result of all my wailing and gnashing of teeth over writing programs is I decided to buy Scrivener, to organise big projects like my 600,000 word trilogy and an anthology of my Writers of the Future awards,

speaking of which, 2020 was another good year for me.  4 submissions to WotF returned 2 Honourable Mentions and a Silver Honourable Mention. 3/4 ain't bad. Ain't good either. Only 1st 2nd or 3rd count.  I did the same only better in 2018. 3/4 and one was a Semi-Finalist.

The awards however are asymmetric. The Table shows awards given for the Quarter.  My Silver HM Qtr.4 was equal 134th. if it had been in Qtr.3 it would have been equal 67th. Conversely my HM ranked better for being in Qtr.3 equal 330th, rather than Qtr.4 where it would've been equal 458th. As the contest grows the competition get stiffer, I am happy to still be winning awards, I must be improving.  

I also decided to buy ProWritingAid (Black Friday sale) for checking grammar and style and everything else chapter by chapter since with anything more than a chapter the incredibly detailed checks it does will slow you down. For example: Part 1 of Book 1 in the trilogy (90,000 words) took 9 mins and gave me 1473 errors and I accidentally hit the [Realtime] button instead of the an [issues] button. It restarted and wasted another 9 mins. And if you don't correct (or ignore?) the errors then save, it restarts next time you open.  

The error count was a lot bigger first time around but I had corrected the spelling issues, (again almost exclusively my Character Names) and saves the story 

The firsts lesson: don't open a whole book in PWA, do a chapter at time.

These comments subject to change without notice, I'm on a steep learning curve.    

I practiced with a couple of paragraphs (326 words) from my next sub to WotF, fixed all the issues and then sent it back to gold fashioned,  to format ready to submit. Word found a grammatical error PWA  missed.

ooroo

The GRim error count ... continued

g'day gentle reader  

as promised  ProWritingAid's five remaining errors turned out to be ordinary boring abbreviations of a space opera kind:  comms (2) for communications , 1 each of  techos (1) and unsuit (1).  ProWritingAid informed me there were 'no such words'.  The fifth and last error was  a preference for air-con rather than aircon (1). PWR also had a couple of

style suggestions 

hot water spigot: can you use a stronger adjective than hot  (boiling scalding scorching) This was a simple case of misconstruction, which hot-water spigot solved. 

and a couple of rubbery eggs ...  readability may be enhanced by and two rubbery eggs. It may, but it will also loose the comic flavour - I left that one alone beside Australian usage (er - mine) does not necessarily mean exactly two.   (give it a couple of days, she'll be right = 2 at least days.) 

hadn’t damaged anything  to had damaged nothing  readability again (  more positive - accepted) 

[ "Both were crammed" into her life pod ] passive verbs make your writing less direct. Good advice but the suggestions were nonsensical in the context  [ "I/we/they crammed both" into her life pod ] they are already there.

like Word, PWA wants to convert all We'll have to to We must,  but must is not always appropriate it depends on the context. Sometimes what is mean is We aught to. 

I loved this one 

the electrics are shot, as one character says to the other meaning the electrical circuits no longer function.  PWA said they/I/we/it shoot/s the electrics Seriously? 

Of course the program was objecting to the passive verb "are" It pays to keep in mind, ProWritingAid et al are sets of algorithms, perhaps a bit more sophisticated than most but still just programs.   

And it seems to me the program does not yet have a handle on dialog. 

ooroo

The GRim Error Count

Once more unto the blog, gentle Readers, once more;
Or finish the story up with our English words

(with apologies to the Bard)

Now let me be clear from the start. I'm back unto the blog in an effort to promote my writing and lift my profile a little above sea level. All post will now be solely about the writing and nothing but the writing.

My earlier trilogy of blogs begun in 2004 were meant to be about

The original Blog

Life: called "That's Life" subtitled 'A Baby Boomer's thoughts on the privilege of aging. (concerned as ever with maintaining my
(live donor) kidney transplant)' 

the Universe: called "A Writer's Blog" and tagged: 'I write, therefore I am' survived until 2014 and the one you're reading now that I'm resurrecting.

and Everything: called "Eye of the Robot" which was set up in 2004 and got its first post in 2007. I had such plans but it never really got off the ground.  

In the end due to failing kidneys and a transplant "That's Life" usurped "Eye of the Robot"  which  in  2015 was itself transplanted into "A Writer's Blog" (the 2004 entry is embedded in a  2007 post)

So, to begin again as I have begun so many times

gday gentle readers

I've been experimenting with Pro Writing Aid.  I uploaded The GRim, a tongue-in-cheek satirical comedy, or perhaps a comical satire to ProWritingAid.com. (here-in-after PWA) This story analyser (free online to limited of 10,000 word) is supposedly the best thing since sliced bread for writers - assuming writers like sliced bread. Its definitely a step up from grammarly.com, which is only marginally better than words Grammar & Spelling checker.

The Grim @ 7000 words is one of my shorter stories, and it appears in the anthology Out of the Dark, edited by Robert N. Stephenson and published by Altair Australia Pty Ltd.

PWA found 256 errors, divided thus: 160 grammar issues, 63 style issues and 33 spelling issues starting with "unusual capitalisation" in reference to the title The GRim. (as explained in the story GRim is how the characters of the story refer to their environment ~ the Galactic Rim)  

As in most of these programs there is a choice of fixes. In this case "ignore" or "disable rule".  I chose to ignored, until it popped up again. I then chose disable rule which PWA chose to ignore.

As with word, once I added character names  to "my dictionary" the spelling issues dropped from 33 to 5.  I'll discuss those 5 in my next post.

to be continued ...

ooroo for now 

A Writer's Lost Thoughts

g'day gentle readers  

I dreamt last night I was a writer. (That's a first - I sometimes have the weirdest dreams or salacious ones, even boring ones but never in any of them, have I been a writer) 

The dream writer was in, metaphorically speaking, a dream location. A farm of magnificent beauty and scale much like a film set. (Recent visits to real film locations like Hobbiton and Monument Valley probably played into the setting. Me the dream writer took notes and photographs much the same as me the real writer does. 

And then me the dream writer had what all writers dream of, sudden inspiration and I dreamt up a solution to a problem, I the real writer has had from book one of the trilogy. At the same time, the dream solution provided the seed for a scene that will become the trilogy's epilogue. 

Then I woke up. 

Now let me digress a moment because the dream solution solved a problem that should never have existed. It arose out of the way I write. I start knowing only where I want to end and make it up as I go along. Problem is I often forget little but significant details made up on the spur of the moment (with good reason at the time) and dismissed until stumbled over during the edit, at which point I scratch my head and say, "What was I thinking?"

For example from Book 3: The Arch of Restoration.

"There seemed to be no end to the flickering torches, they filled the park, the roads and all the gaps between the houses. Jorgena had seen crowds before but this was something else; this was a population on the move, a vast flowing beast like a herd of Wilderbeef." 

Rowena: “I take it the relays are in place.” 

Jorgena: “Yes.” 

Author: "Relays? What relays?"

As Sarah inspects the hull, she wonders why Jorgena went to such trouble to remove her implant but had no objection to her twin daughters having them. 

Author: "I'm with Sarah. Why?"

Thanks to Burnell’s slip as he began the scanning process…
Author: "What slip?"

“Look on the bright side,” Jorgena said hiding her one true regret. 

Author: "Which regret was that?"

Now the problem the dream writer solved, which the real writer created at the start of the trilogy, was a headless body in a dam overflow pipe. The scene in Ch7 of Book 1 is a precipitating incident for a major POV character. The problem is - whose body is it, who killed them and how did it get there? 

In creation, I had a few quick thoughts: I'll make it a bloke who is going to disappear anyway and have this person who is both mysterious and powerful do the deed - solved, forget until later, write on, 500,000 words to go. A decade and 500 Kwords later, I have never revisited the question and the first reviewer of Book 1 wants to know who the body belongs to - so do I.  

The original thought for 'who' got blown away, he turns up alive in Bk3. There are no other logical contenders without unbelievable contrivance. It would be better to invent a character and integrate he/she into the story but that adds more words to a book that is way too long already. Secondly, the person I had in mind to do the deed would not leave a body. She has the resources to make a body vanish completely. Then there's the location where body turns up: on a farm in a dead end valley with a single track in. Who would be stupid enough to drag a body all that way then dump it where it is bound to be found. 

So like the above examples, I have to scratch my head and say, "What was I thinking?" It plays on my mind and then my dream writer comes to the rescue and writes dream notes which when I wake and look for them, don't exist. I do remember however, I have the answer but of course, it's not something I want to reveal. 


Here's a hint: Think iconic phrase from 

ooroo until my next post
RoB

Done ... almost

g'day gentle readers  

The title sums up. The summary is done ... almost. As posted on Facebook the result was somewhat uneven and unexpected 

of the 58,854 word summary for the 581,270 word trilogy

Bk 1: 8,312 / Bk 2: 18,883 / Bk 3: 31,659   

                   
I started summarising chapters and ended summarising paragraphs, so now I'm summarising the summary from book 2 trying to get them all under 10 Kwords.  As I say, done ... almost.  

The exercise however, condensing the work to 10%, covering years of effort in a couple months, was useful. Some passages jumped out and smacked me in the face. 

For example: In Book 2 FACE, I deliberately created
a villain (Hyatt), easier and more fun to write than a hero. Then as I summarised the second half of book 3 ARCH, I was struck by how many enemies the poor guy now had. He has to die (the reader will expect it) but I'm hard pressed to settle on which character will do the deed, and satisfy the reader that justice has been done; everyone in book 3 wants to, including his mother.

Again during the summary some of my vague ideas gelled as I got a grip on story as a whole. 

For example: Way back (both in time & words) in Book 1 BREAK, I put in a scene where Averil wields two named swords, Willard's and her own. This isn't supposed to be possible with swords keyed to the user. The scene and its problem were left to be dealt with at some future date once the rest was written. 

Later I settled on keying the sword to the users DNA in such a way that a close relative (i.e. parent|sibling|child) could also use the sword but that meant I had to make Willard and Averil siblings. That became a new problem; the crux of this tale is these two having a child destined to save the world.

But then during the summarising of Book 3 ARCH it became clear what needed to happen and the solution to that problem cleared a heap of other niggling problems throughout books 1, 2 and 3.

Come now, you really don't expect me to reveal the solution ahead of publication.       
  
'ooroo until my next post 
RoB

A Quick Update

g'day gentle readers 

As usual despite what life throws my way I do progres, I write (as in summarise, which inevitably includes writing) daily - almost (I did lose 2 days)

	chapters	words
done	322	477,163
to do	59	104,070

I'm now summarising the last part of the trilogy's seven parts? 

ooroo until my next post (once the summary is finished)
RoB

Revised Standard Edition

g'day gentle readers 

On the day of my last post I reached the first of the two milestone (perhaps millstones) highlighted below .

If only I understood 
what it all meant. 
The red bits not highlighted are my attempts to clarify what I think I meant. 

To understand how this happened I must plunge into history for a salutary lesson in how not to write a novel - not slow.

Book 2: FACE  (The Face of the Goddess) started well, with the exhilaration of finishing Book 1: BREAK, which took only a year to write, still fresh in my mind. I had six chapters approx 30K words done when we decided to move back from to Adelaide from Sydney.

We started a 7-day business and the writing slowed to a dribble. At the same time a health issue I'd had since age 10 reared up so I had an operation, we closed the business and my condition steadily worsened but That's Life (my other blog). What I did not understand at the time however was the illness was slowing my mind, not just my body. 

A bookshop on weekends and
a postal agency Monday-Friday
a writer's studio not ever 

The shop had made the writing stop-start but by the time I was free of that my mind was on the blink and the story boldly went where no story should go. I didn't like it,  I chopped and changed, inserted 50K words before the original 6 chapters. 
Several times I stopped altogether to edit and submit BREAK or edit parts of FACE, drew up timelines, character sheets, glossaries, outlines and even managed a few very short stories (published by AntipodeanSF) 

Then I made one of those pebble-in-the-pond authorial decisions, which ripple throughout a manuscript - I changed the nature and direction of several POV character such that the entirety of the finale, Book 3: ARCH shifts a generation.(my original plan)

I restarted the edit with that in mind, changing as required. Problem was that half the time (due to the earlier edits) I didn't have a clue if a change was required. Try reading a novel at one sentence per fortnight and you'll get the idea. One tends to lose track of who's doing what with whom.

I was working at glacial speed. (pre globally-warmed glaciers of course)

Writing/Editing FACE stretched over a decade. 

Some individual scenes are good, an occasional chapter is not bad but the separate parts do fit together well and the edit of it got bogged trying to reconcile the mismatches. 

I gave up at FACE chapter 105 where it says Full edit to here 

I now ditched the arbitrary chapter divisions, called each POV change a scene, renumbered the lot and started editing from scratch - Book 1 Chapter 1 - tweaking events to produce the new story arc/thread I wanted through FACE and ARCH.  This time I got to scene 99 in FACE where it says Revised edit to here ... and life again got in the way. 

Forward to the Past: Post transplant and life back to normal. 

I wrote Book 3: ARCH in one year. The trilogy was done and now to edit. BREAK took a month. But FACE ah, there's the rub  

So back in the now after a long break and needing to come to grips with the sour tale FACE had become I resorted to a desperate measure * outlining * to integrate FACE into a revised standard edition.

As to said outlining, I'm at scene 23 of Book 3: ARCH past the trilogy's dread sagging middle called FACE. Only in outline mind, the edit is still to come.  I'll try to keep you posted.  

ooroo until next time 
Rob