Paksworld

“Are we there yet?”  ask the impatient ones.

Maybe.  Closer, anyway.   The readers now like the first two of the POV sections to be worked on.  As always,  any change affects the whole, so a perfectly good next chapter now isn’t perfectly good.  Nor the one after that, or after that…there’s the propagation of information (nice catchy phrase–belongs in a Tom Lehrer song…)   Spoilers below, for the spoiler-avoidant among you.There’s lots more signal to noise ratio up front now.   Anyone who doesn’t see the headlight of the train coming down the tracks…well, they should’ve, and they’d better not complain when all those wheels are crunching their bones that they didn’t have enough warning.  So much for the quiet “calm before the storm” part that you alpha readers endured.    So much for the intentionally-disguising bits.   There it is: headlight, gleaming on the tracks.

On the other hand, it’s then possible to pile more weight of worry, more incipient conflict, on the train.   Readers (sensible, intelligent, perceptive readers) will know that this isn’t about a little problem–some temporary personality conflict, say–this is a great big important problem, a whole freight-car-load of sensitive high explosive that wasn’t properly secured and nobody’s noticed until now.   With the plot-train already rattling along at a good rate, and many a curve, viaduct, tunnel, and steep grade ahead, as the train climbs toward the hinge of the plot, somewhere in the next book (probably.)

What the reworking has revealed to me is something I sort-of-vaguely (but not clearly enough to make use of it) suspected…there’s more than one cause of  someone’s bad judgment.    Plot bombs have revealed fractures in the rock of character, as it were.   Later in the book some of these will crack open–and some of those events were already there, but not sufficiently set up.

The first affected POV chapter grew so much in the rework that it had to become two chapters,  which meant I had to renumber all the chapters and they reached the magic number for this story-universe.   The total wordage also came up above the line I’d drawn, but not too much.   What’s needed in the remaining POV chapters shouldn’t add much if any wordage, and I can trim the small excess back down.   I’m about 2/3 of the way through the affected chapters now (the original page count for that POV was over 300 pages)  and–if it weren’t for little matters like tomorrow’s voice lesson and choir rehearsal, before which I need to learn a lot of music, and the Christmas Eve services, I could be done in another two days.   (Says the internal Miss Snark: that’s what you think, sister!)