Update: FINISHED AT LAST!
By which I do not mean actually finished-finished. I mean: the draft is finished, but the back half is rough. Rough-ish. The front half, until we get through the pass and into the starlit land, is fairly well polished, though I’m still, you know, tweaking. I’m trimming a bit and tightening a bit and reading through my notes and going OH, RIGHT and tweaking some more. This is fine. I rather enjoy this part, in fact.
Then we get through the pass into the starlit country and I start to draw in the Tarashana people and naturally I found out a lot more about them en route to the ending, so of course they are not sufficiently consistent all the way through this part of the story. I am vividly aware of this, but straightening it out is going to be (a) a nuisance and a half, and (b) imperfect, I would bet, and therefore I’m expecting to send the earliest version of the polished draft to readers who are especially good at continuity earlier rather that later in the beta process. That way, these early readers can say, “Wut?” and “But on page 400 it says thus-and-so, which directly contradicts this bit on page 602,” and “Wait, wait, if the Tarashana ________, then why can’t they also ________?” and so forth.
On the other hand, getting through the last chapter was an absolute bear and therefore I’m pretty darn pleased to have gotten through it. Various things happened that I just did not see coming very far in advance, so framing it in my mind was hard. What I mean is, in contrast, let me see … All right, so RIHASI also went long in draft and parts of it were much more difficult than other parts, so it makes a good comparison.
When I started to write RIHASI, I didn’t have the first chapter in my mind, and that was difficult and slow. Ditto for some of the other earlier chapters. But that scene or series of scenes at the end, where Rihasi finally lays out her case for Lord Aras? I had a huge proportion of that scene in my head, right down to some of the specific dialogue, for months before I got there. So when I finally did get there, whoosh, straight through, very fast.
For HEDESA, it was completely the other way around, so I knew exactly how I was going to do chapter two, complete with a lot of the essential dialogue, long before I wrote it. But I didn’t know anything much about the ending chapters. Very different experience! I like it better the other way, like RIHASI. Working toward something I have very clearly in my head is more fun than fumbling toward something that I don’t have a clear picture of.
Well, whatever, I’m through it now and into primary revision. Primary revision USUALLY does not take that long, so I hope I will be sending the draft to early readers by May 1, though it might take a little longer.
However, the whole first half is in pretty good shape, and it won’t be any trouble to continue dropping half a chapter or a full chapter into my Patreon every week until I finally drop the whole complete thing.
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