COPPER MOUNTAIN: Progress!
You may occasionally wonder what I’m working on. I don’t like talking about things that are in the early stages, but COPPER MOUNTAIN is way past that point. Also, since bringing out TUYO, I’ve seen a handful of comments like, “Well, the one I REALLY want to read is COPPER MOUNTAIN, but fine.”
I’m happy to know that various readers are eager to see COPPER MOUNTAIN hit the shelves. I honestly thought I might get through the complete revision over the July 4th weekend, but it’s stretching out longer than I thought, so that didn’t happen.
However, I am working on it, I am making progress, and I am happy with how it’s going. I am absolutely certain I will bring it out this year, but perhaps closer to Halloween.
Stuff I’m doing:
–Adding transitional material that helps the first half of the story flow better and prevents it from feeling too episodic. I think this is working pretty well.
–Trying to prevent certain minor secondary characters from being present in the first half and then disappearing from the second half. I’m not entirely sure I can quite pull this off considering how large the cast is already, but we’ll see.
–Giving Natividad a more definite character arc. I just figured out how to do that, I hope, and I’m working on that now.
–Smoothing out the last bit and making certain things happen in a more plausible and also less repetitive way. I think I know how to do that.
–Deciding whether a certain character remembers certain things at the end of the novel and clarifying for the reader the moment he forgets these things, if he does, and making him deal with them if he remembers them. There’s not much to DO here, but I have to decide which way it goes.
–Speeding up the feel of the first half, even though I’m adding transitional material. There are two basic ways to help the pace feel faster without actually chopping large chunks out of the manuscript:
a) cut at the sentence level.
b) shorten the chapter length and just have more chapters.
I will probably be doing both. Those are mechanical jobs that don’t require a lot of close attention but do take some time.
For those of you who read this manuscript earlier this year and provided feedback, thank you so much! I had to practically resort to archaeology to unearth your comments, buried way back in my email, but I very much appreciated your feedback once I pulled COPPER MOUNTAIN back out.
For those of you particularly impatient for a look at it, in the not too distant future, I would appreciate a couple of gimlet-eyed readers making a copy-editing pass through the manuscript. I hesitate to ask those of you who looked over TUYO because you did a great job, but I would feel like I was imposing to ask you to look over COPPER MOUNTAIN too. But if you happen to see this post and want to see the story early and don’t mind, by all means let me know.
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