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Alpennia: filling in the holes fast
Aug. 24th, 2013 09:30 pmIt's astounding what I can do when I have several weekends in a row with no out-of-town things scheduled. I've been going back and filling in all my placeholder text in the work so far on The Mystic Marriage. When I wrote Daughter of Mystery, my working method was just to leave the placeholders until I finished the entire first (holey) draft because it was important to keep the writing rhythm going and not get bogged down in coming up with proper names and technical details. But this time I'm not so worried about the rhythm getting lost. And this time I have a test reader clamoring for read-as-I-go privileges (*waves hi*) so I decided it was time to get those details caught up.
I sent out chapters 1-3 for test-reading on June 23 and then I had a long hiatus when my writing time was all in transit. (Filling in placeholders requires having a real computer in front of me and a good internet connection, and -- ideally -- access to my library.) So I got up to chapter 8 three days ago and sent it off. Today, I've made it as far as chapter 13. It's probably a good place to leave my test-reader ... right at the big cliff-hanger. By the end of next weekend I have hopes of getting all caught up to the end of chapter 21 which is the end of the completed continuous text at this point and brings us up to the Big Break-up Fight between the romantic protagonists who haven't actually gotten together yet when they have the fight.
The next 4 chapters after that exist in fragmentary draft. (I've been relaxing the "write from beginning to end" principle a little and doing small sets of chapters in parallel to some extent.) So then it will be back to the regular writing routine for a while. By the end of that set, I've finally gotten my romantic protagonists in bed together. (Well, ok, technically they were in bed together once before ... but only one of them was aware of it at the time.) When I've gotten that far, it will be time to review the outline of the remaining chapters because I'm not sure whether I can fit everything in properly with the current outline (which calls for 12 more chapters after that) or whether I need to insert another cycle of point-of-view (i.e., 4 more chapters) to get everything sorted out.
It feels all very close-to-finished, in part because I have a very clear idea of what-all is going to happen in the rest of the book. (Which I didn't have at the same point in Daughter of Mystery.) But completion time is going to depend on other distractions in my life.
I sent out chapters 1-3 for test-reading on June 23 and then I had a long hiatus when my writing time was all in transit. (Filling in placeholders requires having a real computer in front of me and a good internet connection, and -- ideally -- access to my library.) So I got up to chapter 8 three days ago and sent it off. Today, I've made it as far as chapter 13. It's probably a good place to leave my test-reader ... right at the big cliff-hanger. By the end of next weekend I have hopes of getting all caught up to the end of chapter 21 which is the end of the completed continuous text at this point and brings us up to the Big Break-up Fight between the romantic protagonists who haven't actually gotten together yet when they have the fight.
The next 4 chapters after that exist in fragmentary draft. (I've been relaxing the "write from beginning to end" principle a little and doing small sets of chapters in parallel to some extent.) So then it will be back to the regular writing routine for a while. By the end of that set, I've finally gotten my romantic protagonists in bed together. (Well, ok, technically they were in bed together once before ... but only one of them was aware of it at the time.) When I've gotten that far, it will be time to review the outline of the remaining chapters because I'm not sure whether I can fit everything in properly with the current outline (which calls for 12 more chapters after that) or whether I need to insert another cycle of point-of-view (i.e., 4 more chapters) to get everything sorted out.
It feels all very close-to-finished, in part because I have a very clear idea of what-all is going to happen in the rest of the book. (Which I didn't have at the same point in Daughter of Mystery.) But completion time is going to depend on other distractions in my life.
