The anthology I’m on the

February 28th 2002 at 9:48 pm

The anthology I’m on the short list for is Ideomancer Unbound and you can see the guidelines by going to Ideomancer and clicking on ‘anthology.’

I’ve been huffing away at the novel. Came a point last night where I realized I needed to stop and regain my footing. I was starting to write, but write to gain time while I figured out what next to do in the chapter sequence of part II. That’s not good, I prefer a leaner arrow towards the end. No dawdling!

In order to cut to the chase of part II, I needed to jump from part I’s mad rush by blimp, then by foot, through the jungle to the north. Thing is, I can’t afford time spent mucking about in the jungle getting there after a certain point, because that would mean 4-5000 words of my characters wandering through jungle with no particular urgency or anything hanging over their heads. And I think any reader would get the point by now. There is still yet a city and the frozen north to get to. We’ve been in the bush long enough. I realized I needed a big flashcut, but I was already many chapters into part II. Part I was 23.5K, Part II was about 14K.I was planning on a novel with 3 parts, 25K each (75K total).

So for structures sake I shuffled things around a bit, moved a block of chapters forward from Part I into II, moved a chunk from II into I. I’m happy with the flow, very happy, it’s much more dramatic and fun this way. But now Part I is 30K, with Part II being 7.2K.

I swear to you I’ve made less work for myself, I think, and we’re just going to have to trust my instincts here.

Of course, that now makes it look like 3 30K parts will be 90K, not 75. That’s a bit of a difference I wasn’t expecting. But I’m not worrying about that right now. I’m mainly happy with the organizing and clip of the novel, which is better now.

I’ve loaded all my clips and snippets and chapters into a program called Omnioutliner (available from the Omniweb people if you own a Mac) that allows me to insert points, color code them, shuffle them around, make dropdown lists etc. I’ve used that for most of this to help me figure this all out. I am going to spend more of tonight plugging in chapters to part II to get an exact picture and map of what the _hell_ I’m doing.

I will still finish in April, I will still finish in April, I will still finish in April. At least, that is what I tell myself.

tb

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