Hello, my friends and the occasional relative!

I have rewritten one of the penultimate scenes in the book. I know where it starts, and how it ends and re-enters the previous narrative. It serves a lot of good purposes, and includes a great deal I had not fitted in before in my mad rush to the August ’23 finish line.

But.

It still needs work. I really wanted to be done this weekend, and might have too, if not for a pesky seasonal event in an online game I play (see hobbyist vs. professional right there). However, I think that even had I not burned hours playing a foolish game, I still would not have finished this weekend because of two things.

One, I’m swithering over compressing a sub-scene or eliminating it. I’m not sure how efficient it is, but it does work in terms of fixing a physical location shift which is necessary. I could gloss over the transition, but I hate it in films when someone just appears in a room and you have no idea how they got there. Brenda at the end of Highlander: MacLeod and Kurgan (I know, the Kurgan, sheesh) fall through a glass ceiling and hit concrete floor 60+ feet down and they don’t die due to immortality. Cut scene, Brenda is trying to open a door to get out of said room the two immortals just fell into. How did she get there? Alive? Nothing shows her climbing down a fire escape and entering through a window or exterior door. She’s just there, having last been seen slowly edging along a wall, and watching the two fall through the glass. So she gets down there hella fast. (I just rewatched the scene, in the shadows there might be a fire escape she was climbing towards, but at the speed she was going the Kurgan would have had decapitated Connor way before she even got to it.) That kind of thing should never happen. The cutting room floor probably has an answer, but I am my own continuity editor here, and I can’t let that crap fly.

Two, and I realized yesterday this applies just as much to the previous scene I’m removing: the emphasis is off. Our main character has just been through an ordeal, and is so close to a lifetime goal, then this scene/sequence… happens to her. No bueno. The events don’t have to change, but her interpretation and interaction with them certainly does, to fit her mindset at that time, and have her more actively influence events. This is the big one: a couple of half-sentences popped into my head last night and this morning, and helped me realize what I was missing. So it can be fixed and made part of her journey, not, as it stands, more part of her antagonist’s. (I know why I fell into this trap, which helps me to climb back out of it effectively. No, I can’t tell you right now, there would be spoilers.)

So I changed the old sequence, but retained a tonal and character arc error I had not previously noticed, given my focus on the big ticket information and action I wanted to reveal. The peculiarities of fixing the sequence in terms of its internal parts and where and how people move through their environment is a pain, but doable. Fixing the tone and shifting the perspective to stay with my MC should be easier now I’ve recognized the issue, but requires a lot of fingerprints on the page as it were, touches here and there, changes in dialogue sequence and progression, alterations in reactions and reasons for action being initiated. All the same things can happen, but the reasons for them will be subtly shifted, a different lens/camera angle employed.

It is fascinating that this can be done! How cool! But it is thinky, and I’m getting teeth drilled today and that does not thrill me, so I rate my chances of being productive as low. It’s also northern hemisphere cold outside and I have to shovel my driveway to get out to the teeth drilling, which adds insult to injury as far as I’m concerned.

Thus, (instead of so) I am still not finished. This, my friends, should not come as a surprise. I promise it shall be done this time next week. Promise like a cop in a procedural show. (They shouldn’t promise to get the bad guys, but they just can’t help themselves. I wince every time. Yes, I’ve shared that before, and will again. I should do a blog on never promising unless you want to deal with the consequences of failing to keep said promise. But I’m not promising to do that blog!)

Until then, stay safe and remember to keep track of character perspective at all times!