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.