Part One Down. Next Up: The Fluff.

I've gotten through Part One! Yay!

Elle is changing locations now and she's going to what actually might be my favorite place in the story, the mountain nation. It's modeled after seventeenth century France in a lot of ways, and is full of extravagant characters and situations and I'm very excited to read this for the first time.

It's been almost exactly a year since I've seen these pages.

This whole mid-plot excursion to the mountains is also where I'm going to have to make a big choice regarding cuts, I may in fact decide to cut the entire thing and here's why I think that:

It doesn't do much to further the main plot of the story. It serves to inform Elle and the reader of the larger world and a lot of political relationships that come into play throughout this story and later ones, but nothing I think I couldn't do just keeping her at home or something less involved.

I get a bit self-indulgent, and this is definitely a product of that. What I remember about this part was making pretty designs for fun characters and settings, which I have a weakness for. I also was trying to be a bit art-y and I don't know if that really serves my purpose well. It's a lot of worldbuilding, again, but maybe not entirely necessary to this story.

It gets really long, and might be too long and boring. Again, I think I was pretty self-indulgent with this and the pretty pictures. I've been warned often of having a slow middle to the story and while this may be pretty it might slow it down. It's also a large chunk of my manuscript and cutting it out might make it a more navigable/marketable/otherwise more appealing and thinner hunk of paper. We shall see.

These are all my preliminary worries about this particular segment of my manuscript. Of course I haven't seen it in a year so we'll see if my opinion of it changes as I read. How do you all feel about scenes or entire chapters whose primary goal is world-building? Are they laborious and boring? Or do they add dimension and context to the main plot? I'd like your opinions, because I'm not sure of my own.

But tonight I rejoice! And bring out another blog post. I just went back into my Word document and found my place, so I have a page number for you.

Page: 133/415

Problems I'm Thinking About (besides what I just outlined in the body of the post)
-I'm still focusing on character development and consistency
-and of course fixing the immature writing.
-I read something today about each chapter having a certain level of suspense, and will have to keep an eye on keeping it interesting. I don't have enough distance right now though, that will have to be a next-edit thing where I read through the whole thing before editing instead of editing as I go like I am now.

I'm Still Alive, I Swear!

Hello! Wow it's been so long, I didn't mean for this to happen!

Things have been kinda crazy with packing, moving my brother into his college, moving myself down to College (it was an eleven hour drive) and even now trying to figure out how to be a College Kid. Life now involves a lot more naps and using froyo as currency than I'd expected.

So I haven't gotten a lot of editing done. Strangely I've been really inspired to write poetry the last few weeks, so I've done some of that and we'll see if that turns into a thing.

This month is (supposedly, according to my NaNo Newsletters) officially NaNoWriMo Planning Month, so are any of you all planning anything? I really want to do it this year, as always, and since I'm not actively writing another story I might do it as a side thing. In order to lessen the load my friend and I might do a cowritten thing, which I know is cheating, so I don't know how we'd put that on the site, maybe just track our own progress so we each aim for 25k. It's not a thing you're supposed to do, I know, but it might just be best. If my friend decides she doesn't want to I might attempt it with my roommate, or even on my own but I don't know which story idea to expand on yet. I could retry my original NaNo attempt or start on the sequel to The Prophecy (since I accidentally already wrote an opening scene for it on the car ride to drop my brother off) but I don't think so. I have a list of ideas, I shall see.

I've been thinking a lot, as well. I mean I'm always thinking but it's usually about like, someone's nose or why society is dumb or that really attractive person across the room or something. This time I've been thinking about watching people die.

On the long-butt drive down to Kentucky I witnessed a car crash in which the driver in the car in front of mine went into the median and then flipped over midair, sending both driver and passenger through the windshield to hit the ground. The car ended up in the north-bound lane, and thankfully didn't hit anyone else and no one but the two in the car were injured. However I'm fairly sure I saw two people die that day, and I was the only one who got such a good view of it.

It was startling to say the least, and really hit me that I saw two people (who were unconscious from the initial impact in the ditch of the median) fall to their deaths. It was strange that as I watched it happen I thought "this looks exactly like the movies" up until I saw two bodies flop out of the car. You see the crashes in movies, but never the people who supposedly die in them. This may be because in movies everyone supposedly has their seat belts on, which would stop people from being ejected, but I think it's because however realistic these movies are they don't want to horrify the audience of an action movie. We are so used to seeing the battles, the high speed car chases and the amazing crashes and disasters portrayed in entertainment media but they never seem to show the effects.

A couple days later I saw the movie Now You See Me, which has a high-speed car chase in it and my musings held fairly true there, and that got me thinking even more, as someone who has written battle scenes into this story of mine, who has put characters through death and made others witness it, that I didn't really know what I was doing. (I mean I knew that anyway but now I know it in a different way, you know?) And we'll see how well I did once I get to those scenes in editing. But still I wonder, are books even supposed to make us feel horrified in ways movies won't? Books are already so much more personal, and take place in your head, already occupy so much more time and brainpower, is it alright to have this kind of realism?

I suppose realism from books is in part contributed by the reader and the extent of their experiences and what they can imagine. I remember being particularly horrified in certain parts of the Hunger Games at the violence, I wonder how it would effect me now that I've actually felt those things? I wonder how it would feel to a veteran?

So these are all things I've been thinking about. I know this isn't a particularly organized post.

On another note.... Have some sketches!

These are things I did last spring while on a trip to the US capitol, Washington D. C. and they're based loosely off of the Desert queen (left) and Elle (right) though really (especially for the one on the right) I was just messing around with pens and the thought of those pretty old-fashioned cameo things.

Back to actually on-topic things, I have not, in the past chaotic month, been able to do much editing. I have done some! Just nothing really of note. It's really just me being lazy and/or completely overwhelmed by everything that's going on so once I find out how to be a College Kid and get to a daily routine (which, if you play Sims- protip: get your sims on a daily routine from day one) I will actually pretend to be professional and set aside time each day.

I'm sorry for the long wait, everyone! (I mean no one really seems to read this but still, to those who do, thank you! and sorry.) I'll be back to weekly posts I think from now on.

Rock on, y'all.