Well, the weekend is over, which means back to the grind for me. I think I accomplished everything I set out to do this weekend, including the desk cleaning/rearranging/building a new desktop part. I spent some time last night going over The Dreaming Pools, realizing that in just under 80k words I had too little going on with way too many people. I’m pulling out the jumbo Ginsu knife on this one and starting to hack off the parts that I think need to be let go. Before I dive into that, here were the stats for words per character:
| Words | Character |
|---|---|
| 18823 | Bael |
| 16677 | Yaesuf |
| 9734 | Cy |
| 9481 | Gregor |
| 7995 | Sidihar (minor??) |
| 7234 | Tandri |
| 4004 | Maerlock (minor) |
| 1741 | Voloss (minor) |
| 1167 | Fleur (minor) |
| 263 | narrator |
Dismissing the narrator block (I have a few “quotes” interspersed for chapter headers), I quickly realized that I still had too many “major” characters with some rather uneven screen time (most of Cy and Gregor’s scenes were together, with just viewpoint flips). That’s still five major characters, with someone I thought of as a minor character (Sidihar) taking up more space than a few major characters.
*ouch*
Sadder still to me is that Bael’s scenes weren’t my best work – or rather, I had a lot more fun writing Yaesuf’s scenes and growth than anyone else. Now, thanks to some crafty shell scripting (and the fact that this is all stored in plain text, a directory per chapter, a file per scene) I have been able to pull out and print in block’s each characters major scenes. So last night I dived straight for Yaesuf and began hacking away at his scenes. My goal for this rewrite is to try and at least double, though triple would be ideal, Yaesuf and Tandri’s scenes, with maybe some more play for Sidihar, Maerlock, Voloss, and Fleur. It would change some of the tones of the book, to be sure, as well as cutting out a part of the plot, but I think I can get a cleaner, crisper story with just a few main characters (Yaesuf and Tandri), letting the remaining four act up occasionally (or not, who knows what the next re-evaluation will reveal?).
In an effort not to dull any other fires that might flame up in my subconscious (and because I prefer to start the rewrite process with a red pen and a printed copy, which isn’t conducive to working on it in a dark, bouncing van at 5 in the morning) I started taking notes for a new book this morning, including a rough first scene to try and flesh out the world a little. No more details than that for a while, the rewrite of The Dreaming Pools is still the primary focus, I just don’t want to lose sight of other ideas during this process.
I wonder, with our vacation to Tennessee coming up, if anyone would notice if I disappeared at the cabin for a day or two…? 🙂