Paksworld

Apologies, to start with…I could not bear to see the cover image slide down out of sight…hence the lack of posts for a week.

But I haven’t been idle in that time.   No, the copy edits aren’t here yet, but some structural problems in book two…aren’t here still.   They’re fixed.   Here’s what happened.

Last year I overran the end of book one, and–trying desperately to cram in more than would fit–ended up with 50,000 words that I cut off last year around Thanksgiving.  Those fifty thousand words were all over-compressed–there was more necessary story in between them (so to speak)  although they covered almost the time-span of book two.

So when I started writing book two,  in January,  it expanded more sideways than lengthways.    Since the original fifty thousand words had been part of book one, they ran straight on from the end of book one.   Initially,  I did all the expansion farther on, where the compression and stretching was most evident and the most stuff had been left out.

Some of you probably see the looming difficulty with that.   Book one had a natural end-point (right where it is now) but book two, having had its skeleton written as part of book one, had no real beginning.  And, as alpha-reader K- pointed out, with a year between the books’ release, book two’s first chapter in each viewpoint offered readers no help.

I’d realized that about chapter one myself, and wrote a new initial section for Kieri’s POV.  But Dorrin’s and Arcolin’s were both too abrupt (not in a good way abrupt…just walking into the invisible wall abrupt.)   Dorrin’s is now fixed, I think.   It starts even closer to the last bit of the first book, but with much more emotional connection.   Arcolin’s is under review…I haven’t got the right approach yet.

Aside from that, it’s been a week of many other things going on, some of which I’ve written about on the other sites, and some of which aren’t publication-worthy.

And it’s been hot, hotter, hotter…