Or maybe not so big.
It's about my work-in-revision, Free Souls, and its serial publication on this blog.
In my last post on the subject, I considered some improvements to the novel's plotting and characterization. Well, I implemented those. I also rewrote Chapters 19 and 20 so they'd have more action and less introspection, more showing and less telling.
Having rewritten them, I submitted them for critique on WritingForums.org. And the tough love I got there has brought me to a decision. No, I'm not going to cut the nested story of my MC's past out altogether as one critiquer suggested. Too much in her present is not intelligible without it (at least, I think it's not). And I won't rewrite the whole thing chronologically starting with her high school or college years, as another urged. That would mean ditching the thriller plot, which is necessary for Sandy and Eric to become the people they need to be so they can love each other as they should.
The advice I will take is to cut out all or most of the introspection, and the way I'm going to do that is by rewriting the nested story to set it entirely in the past and not coming out of it till it's done. And making a distinct break between it and the parts set in "story present."
Book 1, Book 2, Book 3 . . . rather pretentious for my piece of fluff, but I think that's the only way to make it work.
I haven't started the work on the Big Rewrite. Instead I've skipped ahead to a working on few chapters from Eric's point of view. I wish they were getting themselves written faster, but with me putting in twelve to fourteen hours of (minimally) paid work a day my mind isn't always at top speed even when I do get a chance to write.
All this has an impact on this blog. Posting this novel (as previously-conceived) was a way of generating content for it, right?
But not any more.
No, as much as I've enjoyed posting the book chapter by chapter, as much as it's been an incentive to stay hard at work and produce, as much as it galls me to give in to it, no more chapters of Free Souls will appear on this blog until it's reasonably done. With the revisions I've made in the typescript, the ones that are up already need more alteration than I have time to do. And I can't just tack the next chapter on and pretend those revisions don't exist. That'd be the same as assuming no one would bother to go back and read from Chapter 1.
Once the novel is completed, God willing, I'll put the whole thing up as a pdf on a separate page on the blog. It'll be better for the readers that way.
Meanwhile, I've been experimenting with flash fiction. And there's always the poetry. I should be able to come up with something for regular posts.
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