3 Green Fish

Whoo, I added another 4 pages today! As you can see, I’m almost a third of the way along in what I’ve written, by page count. In truth, I’m probably even farther along, story-wise, as I’ve made this draft a little more compact and less needlessly verbose than the last. The dialogue has been a lot easier this time through, so that helps make everything flow better without lots of exposition.

I was able to recycle a decent chunk of the last draft, which helped move things along. Almost all of Fink’s dialogue remained the same, and I was able to reuse much of Bandolor’s and Tibalim’s in their scene together, with some expansion and alteration. Sadly, I ended up having to remove a joke/wordplay from the conversation due to the change in language I’ve been working on. The good news is that said wordplay wouldn’t really be funny to anyone but me and the lone scholar of Middle English who happens to pick up my book and read it. So it’s not a big loss, although I think I’ll have to go back to those particular lines later and make sure they flow well.

On the other hand, I was able to add a tiny joke about shellfish, so I guess it all evens out a little. And no, you’re not going to see either of them at the moment — they don’t really work outside of the dialogue anyway, and as for the original one, you wouldn’t laugh unless I told you why it was funny, and then you wouldn’t laugh because as we all know, a joke isn’t funny if you have to explain why it’s humorous. But maybe if I end up with a “director’s commentary” in the back of the book I’ll include it there.

I think I’m getting close to being able to skip ahead to later stuff. I’ll probably go over what I have and map out the scenes a little so I have an idea of what I’d be working off of, but after that I think I could move ahead to playing around with newer stuff from the middle of the book. This draft is a big improvement, but I want to move ahead to text I haven’t written yet, especially given all the story ideas that have popped into my head as of late (I hardly have room for them all).

It’s been over two weeks since my last post, and I’ve made slooooow progress in that time. It probably didn’t help that I had a busy holiday weekend and such, but even taking that into account, my work has been in fits and starts and tiny little amounts. This is definitely the best draft so far, but it’s still a little like pulling teeth out of a flea when I try to get it down.

But things are shaping up. I really think I’ve nailed some of my characters this time around. They just work, and I feel like their characters actually inform their actions. I know what Bandolor wants, and why he does the questionable things he does. I know why Adrianna fights against him throughout the first 10 chapters or so — it’s because she wants something else. No duh, huh?

I’ve also been able to smooth out some logistical plot-related issues this time through, which is really nice. As always, I wish I’d been able to figure out a lot of this before, but I’m making do as is. Hopefully things will pick up a little through December and I can get some of the later stuff done too before the month is out.

Also, I still need a semi-archaic sounding name for the dog, if anyone has any ideas.

Today’s excerpt is a little bit about Adrianna.

Adrianna’s sense of humor came from her father, and she had her mother’s dark green eyes, but there was one thing she had that neither of them did, something hidden deep within their genes that only came to fruition in their daughter. Her memory was eidetic, or nearly so, able to recall events with photographic accuracy. She could still remember her fifth birthday, or at least bursting into tears when she opened all her presents and didn’t get the sheep she was hoping for. Later that day, she shaved her brand-new Totally Hair Barbie in a brutal act of retaliation.