Stregoni Benefici Behind the Scenes
When I started writing Stregoni Benefici, I wanted desperately to have a ten-chapter buffer. I made it to three, if you count the prologue. With the help of June Camp NaNoWriMo (I won! By the skin of my teeth, and these last 7,000 words are crap, let me tell you), I've finally gotten ten chapters up on SB, which puts me in clear striking distance of the end. I'm finishing chapter 24, and then there will be 25, 26, 27, and 28, and a short epilogue.
I haven't decided yet whether I will finish out to 28 before beginning to post again. Of course there's a part of me that wants to get to showing people the rest of this RIGHT NOW but there's also the part of me that loves cohesion and wants to make sure that every piece fits together perfectly at the end of this fic.
Of course, with 50,000 new words in SB, most of them laid down very fast, there's a lot of work to be done on the editorial side. I hope to start posting in the next week or so, and then will maintain a regular posting schedule if it kills me.
In the meantime, for your amusement, here's a compilation of editorial notes from SB. During a NaNo, forward momentum is of utmost importance, so often, when I need to look something up or take more time deciding something, I throw myself a note to go back in for it later.
Isn't it the insane who are known for talking to themselves?
Here's a peek into my head…
Stregoni Benefici: The Draft Notes
(brackets are the notes, outside the brackets are text that the note refers to.)
[Editorial note: this needs to go earlier in the chapter.]
his dark [double check this] hair
[double-check this against Night Watchman to be sure you pulled all this out]
[Edit here to tie this chunk together]
[Make an edit here...cut the middle section and make the first nurse Dorothy so that you can just cut straight to the convo between Elizabeth and Edward]
three princes come to kiss the princess, [you're going to have to double check this]
into the French country [can you find out what this would've been called in 1789]
As Caius [who?] had pointed out
[you need to do a better job with Aro's anger here.]
[Editorial note: You need to back up and discuss some of the things that Carlisle has learned about the revolution.]
[edit for grammar]
"Jacques!" [or some other French name from that era, look this up]
[French people--get someone to do the translation for you]
Why the gentleman [look up his name]
Pressing his back to one of the [some kind] trees
he simply began pounding at the [oak?]
Institute for Musical Arts [check this]
clipboard [is that accurate for this era?]
[insert the bit about the boy and his pamphlets here]
one little boy had particularly good aim, lobbing a [something]
by the Ladies' Aid [double-check that this exists]
[find a good name] O'Hallohan
[you'll need to double-check all this dialogue]
[check that this discovery was made]
[work this back in earlier?]
[you'll need at some point to work into this plot the idea that (spoiler, sorry!)]
[insert section from Chapter 20]
He had piercing blue eyes, and dark hair [check this]