{"id":778,"date":"2021-04-26T00:20:14","date_gmt":"2021-04-26T05:20:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/?p=778"},"modified":"2021-04-26T00:23:52","modified_gmt":"2021-04-26T05:23:52","slug":"newbook-progress","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/2021\/04\/26\/newbook-progress\/","title":{"rendered":"NewBook Progress"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today–tonight, actually–I cleared up a major problem found late last week.\u00a0\u00a0 In moving things from file to file, chunks of a secondary “transfer” file got mangled and I hadn’t noticed.\u00a0 Luckily, since I knew I wasn’t thinking as well as I used to, I kept multiple earlier drafts under different titles, and was able to find the complete draft of that section (it’s about 8-9 pages).\u00a0\u00a0 I gave it a contrasting color (to be easy to find) and saved it twice, once with a title that contained Save Until Final MS <\/em> and the other that said [plotpoint] for editing<\/em>. Then I inserted the latter copy into the main ms. file, deleted the mangled bits, made sure everything fit together properly before and after.\u00a0\u00a0 And did some mild editing, just to calm my nerves again, on the\u00a0 eight pages (changed a couple of verbs, took out a clumsy transition and put in a smoother one) before saving the ms. and staring at the wall, trying to organize what next.\u00a0 Oh yes.\u00a0 After midnight.\u00a0 Bed would be a good idea.<\/p>\n

The eight pages reveals that electricians have been working on the place for the past ten days…but nothing in the action of the last ten days mentions that…hmmm.\u00a0 Yes, they needed an upgtrade of some wiring and some storage units in the basement, which we haven’t seen yet, so there’s something to work on tomorrow.\u00a0 (There’s PLENTY to work on all this next week, along with getting M- his second COVID shot, and a trip to the dentist, and a trip to the city to pay his rent & utilities.\u00a0 But I can’t just dump something like “Yes, that’s what the electricians have been doing in the basement the last ten days” when as far as readers know the last ten days were all about something ELSE.\u00a0 As a reader, that would stop me in my tracks and I’d sit there flipping pages to see what I’d missed.<\/p>\n

There’s about 30 days in the summer, now, that I know are packed full of busy-busy-busy, but not all of it’s plot-worthy.\u00a0 How many times do you want to read through instructors trying to teach kids of different ages and stages of training to do various things with horses and ponies?\u00a0 And deal with gardening, housekeeping routines, trips to and from town for groceries, visits to the clinic, and suchlike?\u00a0 Not as many times as these things happened, since they’re just routine everyday…oh, and deliveries of hay and feed, and hauling away of manure…it’s stuff that interests the characters doing it, but readers, I hope, will be more interested in whether Ky’s used a blue card yet, and why a character didn’t know something Ky thinks he should have known, and why another character is so very hostile, and so on.\u00a0 Nonetheless, plotworthy or not, that pink and purple 3 drawer chest is staying IN.<\/p>\n

All of which ARE plotworthy but are layered onto the existing day-by-day of bringing a large\u00a0 household into full working order, while working around the invited but still chaotic invasion of riding instructors, horses. the whole riding school support system.\u00a0\u00a0 The plotworthy bits need to be shoved around so they make a reasonable (for some definition of reasonable) sequence without leaving too many long stretches of ho-hum more of the same.\u00a0 I didn’t have to worry about this sort of thing previously, but…though the ingredients are in this book now, almost all complete, it still needs to have a temporal sequence that will make sense.\u00a0 Not some crushed together plot-bits with\u00a0 long pauses between.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Luckily, Ky’s past exploits have ways to stick their pins on the map, to throw out yet another metaphor or simile or…I am too tired now and need to go to bed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today–tonight, actually–I cleared up a major problem found late last week.\u00a0\u00a0 In moving things from file to file, chunks of a secondary “transfer” file got mangled and I hadn’t noticed.\u00a0 Luckily, since I knew I wasn’t thinking as well as I used to, I kept multiple earlier drafts under different titles, and was able to Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,5],"tags":[7,21],"class_list":["post-778","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-writing-life","category-vatta","tag-the-writing-life","tag-vatta"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/778"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=778"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/778\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":781,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/778\/revisions\/781"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}