(no subject)
Chapter 1 drafted. Total, with the prologue - 4640 words. Meaning I'm already 600+ words over, and this was supposed to be one of the short bits. I'm already poking around in parts three and four for story threads I can cut without sacrificing the good stuff.
My earlier worries about a general lack of poetry have somewhat abated; I'm finding space for a bit of intensity and thematic stuff in one of the secondary viewpoint characters, who started out as just a bit of attitude but has been surprising me by growing extra dimensions. This is a weird case where I'm only working out what their experiences would really mean for the characters, and how it would shape their worldviews, as I actually write the scenes.
And to my surprise, a minor character who was utterly humdrum in the outline is beginning to become charming. He's already turned scenes which were basically just one character prompting another for exposition into something more like a two-hander. A bit more, and I might even manage a sub-Holmesian double-act. I'm going to have to go back to this chapter at some point, and revise it just to give him a little more banter - just so it'll be appalling when I kill him off!
Overall, I can't really schedule the writing of this book, because I don't know what I'm going to be doing for key parts of next year - but given that I wasn't planning on starting properly until January, and it's now likely that I might be up to chapter three by then, I figure I'll be able to take a break and have a bit of a think as needed. Which is good, because the later parts are going to need some research that I've barely even started on yet!