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 horse of different colour

gday gentle reader 

Taking a quote from my novel, and extending the wriding metaphor of my last post, "First rule of mounted troops, care for your animal or walk."  The animal I had been riding was the trilogy but I got back on a horse of different colour, a new short story, and paid scant attention to the one that had carried me so many miles. At the time the theory seemed sound - to quote from last post - 

It worked until I finished the short story, which then had to edited - oops. I now had two animals needing attention and I was walking, it all became too hard, I fell off - again. 

  And that's about as far as this silly metaphor will stretch without surpassing it elastic limit.

Then Harper Voyager opened their transom for unsolicited manuscripts for 14 days a magnificent opportunity too good to miss.      

 
205,000 word to edit in 10 days, leaving a couple for the synopsis and query letter.  20,500 a day - midnight oil was burnt - rest of life put on hold.

 It got done, it got sent. 

It is not as good as I would have sent if I had continued as I was. I now think however that with out the impetus of Harper/Voyager's deadline it might never have got finished. 

There was so much more I wanted to do. For example the story takes place over a year. I have a chart with every POV characters birthday marked. Another has the daily temperature and rainfall for every day of the year. telling details which never got used. 

Then (of course) as soon as it was sent I found an error on the first page - consecutive snatches of dialogue from the same character and the response from the other character in the scene  (supposed to be between those snatches) was missing. 

   

I now have a new editing philosophy, which works the same for me as the "write book three in a year" did to get the trilogy finished, 
to wit: For book two I've given myself until the end of the year to edit it (overly generous I now think) The total words divided by number of days give me a daily target to edit. Since today's target was reached yesterday I had time to blog about it today  

ooroo until my next post 

Rob