Damn!
Nearly a thousand words of chapter 14 done so far, and most of it will have to be scrapped or re-written. I'd gotten the timing wrong. I'd been writing all the characters as being exhausted as they went to school, after the big battle at the end of chapter 12 and start of chapter 13. But I've just looked back at my timeline and seen that the battle was on a Saturday night. (It's so easy to forget.) So they'll have all Sunday to rest up. Bother!
Thank goodness I hadn't written all that much yet.
Haven't made as much progress on chapter 14 yet as I'd like. A lot of my effort so far has been in trying to plan the thing out; there are, by this stage of the story, quite a few different plot threads going, and some of them are in urgent need of updating. I haven't finished this yet, but there's enough done to be able to write some opening scenes.
As far as chapter 13 is concerned…I've had some notes back from some of the pre-readers, and there's at least one scene that's going to need some careful attention, and possibly a complete re-write. (Thanks, Abdiel, you were dead right about Tux-boy.) But it's going to be a while before I get all the commentary back: at least a month, probably.
The chapter has undergone two name changes now, amusingly enough. The title that I used in the teaser—"The Face of the Enemy: Crescent Moon and New Moon"— makes it sound as if the face of the enemy is festooned with moons. Not quite what had in mind. For the pre-reader edition of the full chapter, I changed it to "New Moon: The Face of the Enemy". (Making this the first chapter ever to have a main-title change away from the "preview" titles listed on the SM4200 home page.) But of course this revised title was no better. I've now made it "The Face of the Enemy (New Moon Rising)" which I think avoids the problem but still gets across what I wanted. And, of course, restores the title on the home page.
posted by Angus @ 9:47 am
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