Update: aargh, so close and yet not there

Okay, so

— YES, I’m over 300,000 words now.

— NO, I’m not even in the epilogue yet.

— YES, I’m in the climactic scenes.

— NO, that doesn’t mean I’m in the penultimate chapter, because yesterday, as I hit the beginning of the first climactic scene, I broke that chapter up. The plot climax appears in two chapters, and I thought the first of those would be a braided-viewpoint chapter, which I sometimes do when it seems reasonable. And that chapter will indeed involved braided viewpoints to some degree, but not as much as I thought, because (not entirely to my surprise), I’m breaking out parts of that chapter and shifting them into different chapters instead. This should produce a smoother build toward the climax and a simpler penultimate chapter.

— YES, that means the number of chapters has increased. It’s now 56 chapters, plus the epilogue. I have two and a half chapters to write, plus the epilogue. But one of chapters is getting shorter as I remove pieces from it and move them earlier or set them into different chapters.

— NO, there’s no chance I’ll finish this book before August.

— YES, it should be finished SOON after the beginning of August.

My real and honest prediction is that I will be finished with the draft sometime in the first half of August and finished with primary revision by the end of August. That means I’m fundamentally giving myself no more than two or three weeks for primary revision, and I do think that will be enough, because I’ve been doing revision as I go. There’s still going to be a lot to do, but I think it will be fiddly and annoying, not huge and time-consuming.

I’m close enough to the end that the niggling awareness of waiting revision was starting to bother me; to wit, the awareness that a particular important plot element was set up with a pure coincidence right in the beginning. This was bothering me more and more, so this past weekend, I finally called Craig and said, “Hey, this important plot element depends purely on this giant coincidence and this is unbearable, please come up with some reason this should actually happen.” And three minutes later, I had a much better idea of how to set that up. This is why it’s helpful to have one person to bounce problems off of, even though AS A RULE, I don’t like to show partial manuscripts to anyone or discuss unfinished stories.

Primary revision will include these basic jobs:

A) Clarify that early plot setup. I made a note about it at the very beginning of the story.

B) Add date stamps at the beginning of each chapter. Some may disappear again later, but I’m going to need them there so I can confirm that everything happens in sequence rather than requiring the intervention of time travel.

C) Read through from the very top, removing the hundreds of boldfaced words and lines as I go. Every single boldfaced word and line means: something to check, something to confirm, something to translate into a different language. To take one random example, the problem with a more or less contemporary setting is that if you’re driving from, say, Florida to New Mexico, states and cities actually exist and you have to be at reasonable places at reasonable times. Right now, there are places where the text says That City or something, meaning I will need to pull up a map and actually decide what city I’m talking about.

D) Fix up continuity. It’s astounding how many super important things occurred to me over the past week or two. SUPER IMPORTANT HUGE plot elements. Are these elements set up properly in the first, say, 750 pages of the story? They are going to have to be in the finished version and that means reading for that kind of continuity now. I will make a bulleted list of SUPER IMPORTANT HUGE plot elements, review that before I read through from the top, then go BACK through and make sure each of those plot elements is set up properly.

E) Cutting. Might as well. If I’m reading from front to back, that’s the time to revise sentences and trim. I’ve already done some cutting, and in fact there will also be some splicing where I previously cut whole scenes without a lot of consideration for stitching the surrounding scenes together.

That’s pretty much it, I think.

I’m VERY MUCH looking forward to TAKING A BREAK in September.

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