Novel Watch #24: +9 pages [13/62 revised, 68.5 total]
Wooo! My revised second draft of Part 1 has reached almost 20 pages! I’m moving along at a healthy clip. Of course, it helps that I’m not changing Iggsle and Bandolor as much as I am Adrianna, and she isn’t the perspective character of Chapters 4 and 5. I kept a lot of stuff from my first draft of both of those, and did some rewriting and revision here and there throughout. On the whole, it all evened out to a rather small increase in total length of about half a page.
(Math Fun Time! I “added” 9 pages to my previous draft 2 total (that’s the +9 in the title), but my revised pages only went up by 8.5, and my complete total by .5. That adds up to 9! This concludes Math Fun Time.)
Today I worked primarily on Chapters 4 and 5, as I mentioned above. Chapter 4 introduces Iggsle, and I worked a bit on rewriting some of the backstory I included in my first draft. Honestly, though, I’m thinking of cutting most of that out and revealing it gradually in later chapters (or a sequel), much like the way that I let Adrianna’s traumas take a backseat to other more immediate concerns — they’ll come out stronger when the time is right (or wrong, for her). Chapter 5 is partially just some necessary explanation, but also a way to establish how Bandolor and Adrianna are going to work together (not well). Bandolor’s a bit pushy, and Adrianna doesn’t like to be pushed.
Here’s a clip from Iggsle’s intro (yes, his surname is Potter — that’s what his father was):
Iggsle Potter was a man of patience, born as wild of a child as ever there was. As a youth, he railed against his father’s authority at the slightest provocation, blundered his way in and out of trouble, ended up in a gang of highway bandits, and generally disappointed his father in every way possible. His father fancied himself a man of the upper classes though only a poor potter, claimed literacy despite barely knowing half the alphabet, and imagined himself cultured when he had no ear for music and poetry, no eye for art, and no tongue for delicacies.