Alastair Mayer’s T-Space Blog

Virtual manuscripts, that is, although my desk is piled with a few marked-up hardcopies too.

The NaNoWriMo novel turned out to be slower-going than I expected because it’s a part two, and has to make sense in the context already established in part one. (Well, strictly speaking for NaNoWriMo it doesn’t have to make any sense at all, but that would just leave me with a bigger rewrite job. It may come to that to meet deadline.)

The requested changes for Chara have gone through a couple of iterations. Trying to make it longer by just tacking another subplot onto the end totally screwed up the beats of the original, so I dug in deeper, reorganized and adding or expanding scenes so that the structure still worked in terms of the revised word count, and that the midpoint doesn’t come too early, and so on. (If you’re wondering what I’m babbling about, there are a number of good books out there on story structure, both for novel and for screenplay. My current favorite is Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat! which focuses on screenwriting but adapts well to novels.)

Then there’s the small handful of short stories that I need to do a final pass on and put in the [e]mail.

It’s Thanksgiving, and while I have much to be thankful for, time enough to get everything done isn’t one of them. I may not be adding anything here until December. Meanwhile, enjoy your holidays.