Update on The Steel Guardian
Whoohoo! After days of total immersion, I just finished the first pass. Completely. Page one to the end of Chapter 22, followed by a mindwrenching gear-shift to writing again.
The ending I had at the end of Labor Day Weekend was the end of the penultimate chapter. It resolved the characters' personal conflicts and blew off the Grand Battle with a couple of paragraphs of vague description, a synopsis. The book was full of action and grand battles, physical and magical. It needed that final confrontation. Huge story questions were raised and left unanswered.
I clipped the synopsis off totally, on the last pass through Chapter 22. It didn't fit. It didn't even fit tactically. I got started on the new chapter, went about 800 words into it yesterday and raced back to remove the last shreds of synopsis for being inaccurate. On into the new chapter. Finish that scene. Set up another scene, pick up another loose thread, head up to the main battle. Develop the MC's attack.
I hit a dead end in the middle of the attack and went to bed. Something was bugging me. Something major had to happen and I didn't know what it was. Sleeping on it helped. I woke up and got it -- saw the big oversight the characters made and took sides with the bad guys again. Bad Things happened. I hit the keyboard racing and it did make sense. All day I've been in and out of it, writing furiously for an hour, thinking heavily for half an hour, doing a line, racing again. Waiting to see what would happen.
If you've ever played roleplaying games or run one as gamemaster, you can remember what it was like to line up the Grand Climax Battle, then have to slow down and decide initiative, get each player's reaction or move, put them together and see what happens. I wasn't rolling dice. I was, however, looking through each character at a time whether they were Point of View or not to see what they were doing and how they reacted to what was going on. It's character driven. I played fair. The outcome is the result of all the characters' actions and decisions moment to moment, with plenty of twists. The magical backstory is solid.
Happily, all the elven magic is based on magic rules I've worked out and used in dozens of other novels before this one. I understood what was colliding as soon as they started pulling the big guns, and just let it blow where it did, like physics. It did. The end chapter is done. No spoilers. Only that there was a Grand Battle in the last chapter and it turned out to be a conclusive Grand Battle for the entire shebang and everything I brought up in the middle. Whew!
When I finally got done, it was the only ending that would happen. Not the only one that could, the risks were many, but the one that did given who everyone is and what they chose to do. That's how it needs to be to form a solid ending.
It's not sitting there saying "Hi, I'm book one of a trilogy and will make no sense unless you buy the other two." It is not just the first third of a novel three times its size. It is a novel in itself and could go off exactly as itself and be considered finished. If I do a trilogy starting with it, that may be one that starts jumping great amounts of time between novels. There are some minor hooks that could lead to Novel Next or just get tied off in little independent short stories with other protagonists or assumed to settle by themselves. I like it that they're minor. I have the most flexibility now with what to do next.
I also picked up a lot more detail to incorporate into the cool prequel I'm writing for Nanowrimo. That's going to be fun. I'm so not done with this world.
Now I'm about to go process kkitten42's edits on Chapter Two, which are wonderful. There's a lot I need to do to it, some suggestions will take major changes rather than just line edits, but not really contradict the rest of the book. Just enrich it. I need to redo most of the dialogue and some of the descriptions, and add detail while tightening to make room for it.
This feels like cutting an agate, sanding it flat, splashing water over the cut sides -- that's my first-edits stage. I can see how it'll look done. The second pass Kitten is doing will polish it to finished, and anyone will get a kick out of it without noticing the prose. Well, what I do after getting her critique will do that. Suggestions like "improve the early characterization" aren't readable in themselves, but will work when I use them!
The ending I had at the end of Labor Day Weekend was the end of the penultimate chapter. It resolved the characters' personal conflicts and blew off the Grand Battle with a couple of paragraphs of vague description, a synopsis. The book was full of action and grand battles, physical and magical. It needed that final confrontation. Huge story questions were raised and left unanswered.
I clipped the synopsis off totally, on the last pass through Chapter 22. It didn't fit. It didn't even fit tactically. I got started on the new chapter, went about 800 words into it yesterday and raced back to remove the last shreds of synopsis for being inaccurate. On into the new chapter. Finish that scene. Set up another scene, pick up another loose thread, head up to the main battle. Develop the MC's attack.
I hit a dead end in the middle of the attack and went to bed. Something was bugging me. Something major had to happen and I didn't know what it was. Sleeping on it helped. I woke up and got it -- saw the big oversight the characters made and took sides with the bad guys again. Bad Things happened. I hit the keyboard racing and it did make sense. All day I've been in and out of it, writing furiously for an hour, thinking heavily for half an hour, doing a line, racing again. Waiting to see what would happen.
If you've ever played roleplaying games or run one as gamemaster, you can remember what it was like to line up the Grand Climax Battle, then have to slow down and decide initiative, get each player's reaction or move, put them together and see what happens. I wasn't rolling dice. I was, however, looking through each character at a time whether they were Point of View or not to see what they were doing and how they reacted to what was going on. It's character driven. I played fair. The outcome is the result of all the characters' actions and decisions moment to moment, with plenty of twists. The magical backstory is solid.
Happily, all the elven magic is based on magic rules I've worked out and used in dozens of other novels before this one. I understood what was colliding as soon as they started pulling the big guns, and just let it blow where it did, like physics. It did. The end chapter is done. No spoilers. Only that there was a Grand Battle in the last chapter and it turned out to be a conclusive Grand Battle for the entire shebang and everything I brought up in the middle. Whew!
When I finally got done, it was the only ending that would happen. Not the only one that could, the risks were many, but the one that did given who everyone is and what they chose to do. That's how it needs to be to form a solid ending.
It's not sitting there saying "Hi, I'm book one of a trilogy and will make no sense unless you buy the other two." It is not just the first third of a novel three times its size. It is a novel in itself and could go off exactly as itself and be considered finished. If I do a trilogy starting with it, that may be one that starts jumping great amounts of time between novels. There are some minor hooks that could lead to Novel Next or just get tied off in little independent short stories with other protagonists or assumed to settle by themselves. I like it that they're minor. I have the most flexibility now with what to do next.
I also picked up a lot more detail to incorporate into the cool prequel I'm writing for Nanowrimo. That's going to be fun. I'm so not done with this world.
Now I'm about to go process kkitten42's edits on Chapter Two, which are wonderful. There's a lot I need to do to it, some suggestions will take major changes rather than just line edits, but not really contradict the rest of the book. Just enrich it. I need to redo most of the dialogue and some of the descriptions, and add detail while tightening to make room for it.
This feels like cutting an agate, sanding it flat, splashing water over the cut sides -- that's my first-edits stage. I can see how it'll look done. The second pass Kitten is doing will polish it to finished, and anyone will get a kick out of it without noticing the prose. Well, what I do after getting her critique will do that. Suggestions like "improve the early characterization" aren't readable in themselves, but will work when I use them!