(no subject)
Chapter 2 drafted. Total 7589 words. After the better part of a month off between Christmas and my parents' visit, I'm finally inching back into the saddle. I'm currently about 400-500 words below my estimated length, which is good because the next few chapters are going to be longer.
This is still such a strange book. I'm longing to write something with the kind of expressionistic fire I had fifteen years ago, but this can't be that story; by its nature it's got to be stripped-back and less expressive. I'm dealing with a very contained POV character, which shouldn't be a problem for someone who wrote a book starring Number Six... but in that case there was always an intensity to express both inside him and in the outrageous images around him. Here so far everything's contained and human-scale; I need to figure out how to express something larger-than-life in a story which was deliberately conceived to be basically life-size.
(I dunno, maybe I can give more POV stuff to Jonesy? Let him be a bit more intense and vivid about it? After all, he's the one to whom the early action is personal on a level beyond "hey, they're trying to kill us"...)
Now at the end of chapter two, I'm finally able to introduce another character, the one who's the reason I'm writing this book. Tonight I finally wrote a line or two which I think captured this character's attitude, and it was like meeting up with an old friend. Now I just have to make sure she can feel three-dimensional in the early chapters, when she doesn't get her personal material till after the halfway point in the book...!