Back in the Saddle – So to Say

I have actually started work again. My intended holiday break in December just kept going and going and going… Yesterday I looked at my Jaws of Empire stuff. I did some tidying up in various places and added a medium sized section to one chapter where Jundah and Wil are talking. I’ve been thinking a lot about JoE recently and I think I need to change a big chunk of the structure. I had planned to have this whole building up a revolutionary movement sub-plot. I recently watched Sergio Leone’s Giú le Testa, known in English as Duck You Sucker. It’s largely about the costs of being a revolutionary. I’ve also been reading a lot about World War II and watching documentary films from the time. I guess the message that so much art about war is saying, bluntly “war is hell,” is sinking in a little. Or it’s sinking in a new way. In any case, I don’t want to write a story about a revolution. Revolutionaries are okay, but I don’t want that to be the point of the tale. So once I get some of that worked out and some other character arcs I will be in a good position to actually write some more chapters. It was easy to do all the character introductions, but I started to have trouble when I had to start bringing the storylines together.

That was yesterday. Today I worked on Deep Dark. I added more to Articka’s last chapter. He end is not nearly so mysterious now. It’s quite explicit. I also went through half a dozen other chapters and made minor tweeks here and there to the wording of things. I was pleasantly surprised to find that most of what I looked at today was not crap. A whole lot, especially at the beginning of the book, still reads as “great!” I most likely am not being quite objective enough (I did write it after all!) and I know the ending chapters are likely to be much less great, but I am pleased to find something I can really work with after coming back to this work which has lain fallow for a while.