Hello, my friends and the occasional relative!

I have had a good week. I hope you have had one too. Now, on the eve of returning to work, I wish I had more time off. Isn’t that always the way?

Too much time spent looking at the screen upon which I now type. But, I spent a lot of time outdoors: touching grass, smelling pine, hearing fish thrash in mating, saving water logged worms from gravel path death. I’m a big softie for worms forced above ground by rain. I wonder what the total biomass of worms is versus the biomass of humans? Could make that a hyperfactual transmission, but I’ll let it alone, better to idly speculate than to know, for now.

I did want to start writing the text of The Red Palace this week. I did not. I drafted the history of a war that precedes and informs the novel. I want to integrate that further into my other notes and the fragments I previously wrote. It was amazing though, writing a history of imagined events absolutely created more reasons for conflict and more character traits and interpersonal history between the four (now five) main characters. So do your background work, my chums and pals, it can often add surprising depth to already imagined scenarios.

I have also embraced the fact that this story will require the most rewrites of any novel I have so far written. I anticipate a lot of subtle shifts to arise as the characters interact, and for me to write sections of conflict and conversation that need to be moved around into a final chronology. I suspect the first draft will be far too direct, and telegram outcomes too early. However I do not want to try to flowchart the thing to death, I think the characters will need to fence and fight and give themselves away in their own words, and not have me over-think it in advance. I will also need to write my way into their voices too, and that could take a refinement round or two or three. I know the broad strokes, some events that will get referenced. I fully expect to invent other events as needed and find a place for them in my chronology. This is such a benefit of a world of your own creation: you can alter anything you want as you make it, as long as by the end internal consistency is maintained. Therein lies the rub, of course.

This is also a one shot – I think the world created is excellent, and ripe for more exploration, but this book is intended to stand alone. If more stories occur to me that demand to live in this world, then to this world they shall go. It is liberating to step away from the World Belt for a while.

So how quickly will this unfold? I suspect a first draft, once started, will arrive at an ending with some alacrity. I hope, and am currently foolishly optimistic that I will be eager to refine and improve from there, to put the living puzzle together and let the characters within live and die as they should. I think editing work will occur as part of each pass, so editing hell can be bypassed. Easier said than done.

Anyhoo, time to go, I have more to do this evening, and only a few hours in which to do it. I’m Alice’s white rabbit – a week of leisure and then all too much to do at the end, and that’s with me simply not doing some stuff I should. You know, because tomorrow.

Until next week, may all your projects progress with optimism at their heart. You will see it through, and it will be incredible.