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Writing Notes - Mid Nov 17
Nov. 15th, 2017 08:28 pmThat was partly through some unavoidable distractions which ended up with me effectively spring cleaning the entire house and reorganising the entire upstairs layout. I'm not sure how much of this was genuine need to clear potential access for the phone guy (which he ended up not needing), and how much was avoidance behaviour. Plus I also got swallowed up for most of last week in trying to decide on a new desktop PC, which is important for the long term, but a short term distraction.
However, I have been writing since I completed the reorganisation and I'm 7 chapters/90 pages into the rewrite of Graveyard Shift from Yoon's notes (somewhere between 25 and 33% done). The existing document (which Word labelled 'repaired') was falling over regularly, every other time I deleted a comment as dealt with, so I've been copying it chapter by chapter into a new document, which is irritating, but not as irritating as wondering if you just lost the last half-hour's work as Word crashes yet again. I've been aiming for about 15 pages a day, though 30 every two days is probably closer to the reality.
One major change is largely complete, the rebranding of my villain as Russian rather than Haitian. I realised I needed a new name for him (no, really!), both a mundane one (Petrov), and a work name, so Baron is now Zmei, which is Russian for Dragon (sorry Yoon!). I also managed to finesse his transition from Russian spy to Haitian drug dealer by writing a back story that has him starting first as a necromancer worshipping Chernebog, then sliding over to Voudoun and Kalfu as he does further study, the propensity of non-Abrahamic religions across the world to have dark and light pairings of gods/powers proved very useful. It makes sense he would home in on the figure holding the same place in the new pantheon. And this all ties in very well with the existing backstory of my protagonist's father, who is also ex-KGB/FSB. The whole conflict becomes a vendetta between two spies (with an implied Heart of Darkness origin) that has been ongoing for 30 years, and is now reaching out to target the next generation, which works much better than the previous conflict which relied too much on chance.
Now I'm up against a slightly tougher writing target. The next chapter needs to be rewritten from my cop protagonist's perspective. Only she's not in the room where it's happening, she's on a plane. I'm literally going to have to phone this one in! Additional problems are this is where another character got introduced, so I'm going to have to work her introduction in somewhere earlier, and try not to undermine her part in the narrative, while delibrately reducing the original viewpoint character's part - I think I know what I'm going to do, but rebalancing is going to be an utter pain. Ultimately the rebalancing may work for me, I'll end up with cop protagonist having one partner for daytime work, and one for night-time, which makes sense within the story, and with both being substantial secondary characters, rather than one a half-used viewpoint character whose chapters were difficult to justify.
