Thud: duellist
Jan. 2nd, 2008 09:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hawkwing_lbProgress: Wednesday, January 02, 2008
The duellist of Alusind
Words today: 185
Words total: 1990
Exercise: push-ups, fighting commuters, walk.
Darling du jour: "As I can," she said, and swallowed the tangled knot of emotion -- old hurt and betrayal and care twisted up together -- in her throat. "My word on that."
Twenty minutes trying to imply conflicted emotion, and that's still the best I can do. Ah, well. We improve, however slowly.
Words MS Word doesn't know: N/A
Books in progress: textbooks, Louise Bruit Zaidman and Pauline Schmitt Pantel (English translation by Paul Cartledge), Religion in the Ancient Greek City, Tobias Bucknell, Crystal Rain.
Crystal Rain may turn out to be one of those books that just don't do it for me. Possibly. I'm going to give it another fifty pages.
The glamour: More essay. Commuting.
Last year, when I was trying to write this book for the first time, I made it to 20K before I had to rip it back to take a look at where I'd gone wrong. The second time, I made it to 12K.
This time, it appears that the lightning bolt of enlightenment has struck at the end of the very first scene, before I've gone very wrong at all. Instead of swashbuckling feats of derring-do involving cross-dressing noblewomen and a quest-shaped plot, it appears that what this book needs to have by way of structure...
...are some of the trappings of the police procedural.
So I need to dust off my questionable Watch Inspector and see that he occupies himself with tension! and stakes! and plot! - which, incidentally, will require me to figure out some more about the political situation - while my necromancer-duellist and her intelligencer housemate go about getting themselves neck-deep in bad trouble.
This still leaves me with a trouble-shaped hole in my plot...
(I will go away and think some more.)
The duellist of Alusind
Words today: 185
Words total: 1990
Exercise: push-ups, fighting commuters, walk.
Darling du jour: "As I can," she said, and swallowed the tangled knot of emotion -- old hurt and betrayal and care twisted up together -- in her throat. "My word on that."
Twenty minutes trying to imply conflicted emotion, and that's still the best I can do. Ah, well. We improve, however slowly.
Words MS Word doesn't know: N/A
Books in progress: textbooks, Louise Bruit Zaidman and Pauline Schmitt Pantel (English translation by Paul Cartledge), Religion in the Ancient Greek City, Tobias Bucknell, Crystal Rain.
Crystal Rain may turn out to be one of those books that just don't do it for me. Possibly. I'm going to give it another fifty pages.
The glamour: More essay. Commuting.
Last year, when I was trying to write this book for the first time, I made it to 20K before I had to rip it back to take a look at where I'd gone wrong. The second time, I made it to 12K.
This time, it appears that the lightning bolt of enlightenment has struck at the end of the very first scene, before I've gone very wrong at all. Instead of swashbuckling feats of derring-do involving cross-dressing noblewomen and a quest-shaped plot, it appears that what this book needs to have by way of structure...
...are some of the trappings of the police procedural.
So I need to dust off my questionable Watch Inspector and see that he occupies himself with tension! and stakes! and plot! - which, incidentally, will require me to figure out some more about the political situation - while my necromancer-duellist and her intelligencer housemate go about getting themselves neck-deep in bad trouble.
This still leaves me with a trouble-shaped hole in my plot...
(I will go away and think some more.)
