But first… GO THE MIGHTY EELS! Woohoo! It’s so exciting to finally have the blue and gold back where it belongs – near the top! However, you have caused me a dilemma, my mighty friends – you see, I’m at a science fiction convention next weekend, with lots to do, and am now torn as to how to find time to watch the grand final… Don’t worry, I’ll find a way.
Now, onto the novel (which now has an ISBN and everything – contract arrived yesterday, more woohoo). I twittered on Wednesday that I’d just finished re-reading the book, and that I’d enjoyed it. I believe I even said I thought I was good at this writerly stuff. Ah, words that come back to bite us…
Thursday morning, I sat down to plot the book against a couple of plot outlines that I have. The first was one Cat Sparks showed me on screenplay structure, and I was pleased that the book generally matched that. I’m wondering if it slows down a bit too much around the seventy-five percent mark, but I’ll wait to hear the beta readers views on that. The second plot outline is from The Art of Romance Writing by Valerie Parv, and deals more exclusively with the plot arcs of romances. I wasn’t surprised to find FTB matched this pretty well for the first half, but then deviated away from it. Generally, these books are tending more towards the romance side of things initially, before the fantasy element takes over.
However, doing both those exercises focussed me on a couple of minor plot issues. I managed to consider and sort through the motivations of two minor characters, and thus was able to make scenes with them clearer and work better and their plot lines to stand up. However, a third one is causing me angst. There’s a couple, Connie and Nick, who’s main task in the story was to make Stephen (the hero) look good, namely by constantly saving her and restraining from killing him. However, Connie is a whiny little shit, and Nick a dickhead thug, and none of the scenes involving them were really working. So I had a bit of a think about it, and decided to reverse the roles – put Connie in as the femme fatale, and Nick as her unknowing dupe. I quite liked the idea, and so started to rework a few scenes. Except I then realised that doing that undid an entire sequence of events that impacted on the romance.
Bummer.
So, now I need to consider if I need Connie and Nick at all, or whether they’re just filling and not really achieving anything. Do I need to make Stephen look good in this way? My concern, when I introduced Connie and Nick, was that Stephen was coming across as a bit too intense and obsessive and that I needed to soften him up a bit to make him more a romantic lead. But then, reading through the book, I think that I’ve already started that in a couple of other ways, and if I make him live less in his head initially and particularly stop the angsting over his past, he’ll soften up. But then, if I remove Connie and Nick, I’ve got to come up with a new way of moving the romance between Stephen and Ione along after the initial coming together.
You know, the more I write this, the more I realise that Connie and Nick do have to go. They were an easy solution to the problem of Stephen, and while sometimes easy is also the right solution, in this case it isn’t. So, back to the drawing board on the first part of the book.