I finished The Red Palace (TRP) again today.

How many times does a writer finish a book?

A lot, in my experience. But I’ve only done this a few times.

The attributionless experiment is over, who says what is now clear. More than that, revisions and rewrites have been included, small excisions, small elaborations. I have grasped, more than I have previously, the power of stopping myself, of reducing addition, cutting sentences short rather than try to explain what they are explaining. Let the reader see what they want to, don’t impose myself too much.

Of course I come fully to this understanding in act five. Get the feel for it, become comfortable with the axe in hand.

Just like it took until act three for me to get a feel for the way I liked to do the attributions, where my comfort zone lay.

AI does not go through this process.

So, I’m going to have to go through TRP again, bearing both those lessons in mind. And again after that, making sure I’m not too repetitive in some of my color moments. I have a weakness for smiles and nods, which is annoying because they get used a lot in actual conversation. We laugh repeatedly when we chat with friends, but if you say that in a book? The people involved look like clueless morons.

The physical cues, the facial expressions we use to augment the words we share with each other are often repetitive, or variations on the same theme. Convey that accurately in a book and you may make paint drying as a spectator sport look attractive. You can’t overdo any one action. Unless you are Robert Jordan, and you sniff as you tug on your braid.

This leaves me with a few more finishings of the book ahead of me.

That’s fine. Book cover will start happening end of this month. I’ll be ready. One of the nice things I experienced this time, as I finished TRP again, was how it became a series of problems to solve, and I could approach the problems quite without any precocity. This was awesome. I still got the feels in places, still recognized it as a story, but there was an internal distance that allowed me to do my job, and this was new, and welcome.

I haven’t forgotten my rant about swanky word use, by the way, but it shall be held in abeyance, for now.