Update: I’m Thinking of Building an Ark

Writing a novel is “terrifying,” it s... Story Structure: Overstated

Update: I’m Thinking of Building an Ark

Exceedingly cute puppy-and-kitten picture at the end, so scan down even if you’re not interested in updates qua updates.

***

All right, last week was a bit unusual in a lot of ways. Let me see, what all was going on, besides a whole lot of rain?

Well, the grand jury had our April meeting. That was last Thursday and took all day. I have now made several general observations regarding various categories of crimes. Some of these observations are not readily sharable on a blog that is, by and large, family friendly. I will just comment that your life will probably go more smoothly if you avoid getting involved with drugs or, hmm, certain categories of photography. I don’t expect this is a shocking revelation. Still.

By the way, if you’re engaged on a life of crime, it might go better if you never say, “Yes, that’s mine,” about anything that you know is illegal to possess. Maybe there’s a reason people constantly admit ownership of whatever, but I have to say, it seems strange. It sure makes the grand jury’s job remarkably straightforward about 85% of the time.

Also, if I had a kid, I would perhaps be hesitant to permit her to pet sit, baby sit, or house sit for ANYONE, despite the fact that I did all of the above and I expect all of you over a certain age probably did as well. I wouldn’t want my kid to grow up thinking she needed to be ultra suspicious of everyone in the universe, and yet.

***

So, on Friday, I helped judge the science fair, which was enormously more fun, obviously.

Here in this county, St Joseph’s Catholic School has the best science teacher by a mile. Ever since they hired him, they’ve cleaned up at the science fair almost every year, and they sure did this time. Last year, I mentioned to a couple of parents that the single thing that would most improve the projects and was lacking in all of them was some appropriate summative measure — either a mean for each treatment or the sum of each treatment, or both. This year, by gum, every single project that should have had a summative measure did, and the projects were in general a cut above last year’s projects.

First, Second, Third, and the first Honorable Mention went to students from this school; the second honorable mention went to a tiny child from a different school, who did a simple but unusually well-designed project involving pet cats and catnip toys. All five of these students did a great job explaining their projects, with plenty of evidence for background understanding of the topics. I do enjoy the science fair very much.

***

Also, on Friday it started POURING rain, which did not stop until Saturday night and in fact it drizzled and misted and rained gently all Sunday as well. I think we got eight inches of rain total. Well, we were having an unusual spring drought, and now that’s certainly behind us.

Horrible rainy weather is great for getting work done, so I finished proofing and formatting the manuscript I took on for a BVC author. Full disclosure: I didn’t like the story at all. Fortunately, for formatting, it doesn’t matter, and that, it turns out, was mostly what this manuscript needed. I just walked down my formatting checklist and redid everything with headings rather than hard line stops and put in an appropriate spacer at all the scene breaks and so forth, whatever, it’s tedious, but also sort of meditative. So that’s done, whew.

***

AND YES, I got well into the climactic scenes for Hedesa, so I’m STILL not finished with it, but honestly VERY CLOSE. I’m not as totally sure about how to handle this next bit, so it won’t be as fast as the first climactic scene, which is now finished. That was fun. I mean, to write. I expect readers will find it exciting and tense. I will be disappointed if you don’t. (But you will.)

I’m kind of alternating forward progress with revision because if I’m going to post half a chapter (or so) at my Patreon every week from now until I drop the whole thing, I have to make sure basic, essential revision is done, as much as I can possibly do it, for at least the first six chapters. This includes utterly trivial revision, such as “Make sure the Tarashana haven’t stopped glimmering gently with starlight since Inhejeriel established that they totally do this.” Realizing I have forgotten something like that is embarrassing. It requires just a teensy bit of revision, as in adding half a sentence here and there in various chapters.

I suspect I’m going to break my (apparently short-lived) rule about cutting anything over 180,000 words in half for publication. I mean, if this were a standalone, I would absolutely cut it in half, but as it is, I do have an ending point in mind and I would like to reach it. I bet the final version of Hedesa comes out above 180,000 words. It definitely (almost definitely) won’t be longer than Tarashana, though.

***

Let’s end with extreme cuteness: