So now I’m more than half-way through my scheduled chapters: 10 out of 17 1st-draft done.

And there’s this pesky chapter that has been jumping in and out of the book, and around within the order of this book.  It’s causing more trouble again as I haven’t been able to decide which POV it needs.

Currently titled “Without Honor,” it shows a confrontation between a 1/2-djinn major character and a full-djinn: his father and the big-baddie.   Useful scene because it shows the difference in power, avoids a talking-heads scenario, and shows a lot of relationship dynamics.

I have come down to writing two versions of the scene (neither is done yet, they’re both written about to the same point– in two different nap-time writing blocks), in order to see which has more of what I want to be shown by the scene.

When viewed by Runa (the novel’s voice-of-reason character), I end up with a completely different feel and set of characters revealed than when I’m in the head of Ivan, being nearly torn-up by his father after decades of careful grooming.

Ivan’s trying to leave the djinn-world for a human life.  I imagine it’s a bit like trying to leave the mafia.

I might have to finish the whole book before I know which point of view, ultimately, will be the most useful.  The main criteria I’ll use are

• Who has the most to lose, and
• What characters need to be known best in this installment of the story.

(H/T to the Book Therapy blog.  If you had a search bar I would have linked two specific articles. :) )

Here’s one I haven’t seen before that illustrates a bit of Sol Stein’s “suspense technique” that I alluded to in my last post.

I know it didn’t originate there, but it sound’s better than “Go read Redwall.” which you can still do if you want to see this technique used with mathematical precision.

The simple summary is that you want to keep your reader tense.  The way you do this is by not answering the questions as soon as they arise; you create a question an then take a walk with someone else getting in trouble before you go back.

Here is my chart:

Cutting edge, I know.  Moving on.

What you see here is my effort to visually represent the pattern of each returning character’s appearances (by chapter).

That is, any characters appearing only once (my crowded Inn in Chapter 3: Old Friends and Others is a great example.  Characters that don’t come back until a later installation) don’t make this list.

You can see my main character in the third row, and I was pleased to see my section-working has her plot advancing just about every-other chapter.  This was my goal.

In the case where she appears in two chapters in a row (e.g., 2 to 3) I changed the POV (point of view) so that the interaction still feels different.  We’re not in her head the next time we see her, so we still have the lingering question of how she recovered from the events of Chapter 2, and new information that we wouldn’t have seen from her POV: that her face is bruised.

~ ~ ~

This chart helped me in several ways.

1. It clarified something I’d missed in translating my time-line into chapters (while I would have figured it out eventually, this saved me unnecessary work)
2. Showed me a chapter to cut/change because I had three in a row with my MC
3. Showed me gaping holes in presence.

This last is (currently) the most useful, not the least because of I’m at an early stage in this draft.

When I made my first version of this chart (While I snuggled my kids watching The Hephalump Movie) I realized that Ivan– the purple in the middle– disappeared after chapter 8 and reappeared at the denouement to produce the Perfect-Thing for the rest of the story.

I hate it when I read stuff like that, so I had to go back and look for other places to lay the foundation for that same act.  Those are the empty circles I added.

The bottom color, Garm, needed to be added to almost every chapter Linnea (MC) is in because he’s her dog, and it’s a sort of plot-point that he’s always around.  I had forgotten this as I went along.

I still have to decide how present her son (second from the bottom, light-green) is.  There are some places he’s necessary and some places he just can’t be.

~

So, there it is, for what it’s worth.  Very helpful exercise for me; maybe to someone else too.

Solid 3,000 words today.  Jay gave me most of the afternoon to work.  Good, good man.

Most of that increase was from importing and revising sections of the first draft to fit the new format.  I’m still working at getting back into the rhythm of the story after being gone for a month.  It’s harder than I had expected or I might not have let it alone so long.

Also working on a new spreadsheet to solidify the time-line of events (in the actual novel, not the whole world), where multiple things happen within a short time, and making sure that’s logical with travel-times and all.

This draft has been more streamlined than the first, so I am (when I let myself think that far ahead) waffling again on whether the story will be better served as three too-short books (I’m visualizing Spiderwick here) or one long-ish one.

Also, due to the need to polish my first 10-pages for a mss consult coming up, those pages are now (tentatively) available upon request.  The tentatively part depends on whether I know you. ;) I’m not yet so confident about it all that I’ll give it to anyone.

E-mail me if you’re interested.

Still hoping to get a few hours of writing in after the kids’ bedtime.  My goal is to be back to normal production by the end of the weekend.  If I can do that I should still have the first book (or first third of the book) done by the time school starts.