Return of the Sun

Update 37 14-20 Feb 2022

This one will go a bit differently. The weather, while still having cold days and snow squalls is tending toward much warmer. I almost feel like spring is trying to make an early appearance, and that has given me a slight boost.

I’m still struggling with my thoughts and with life stresses not dealing with the writing. But I have a glimmer of hope. Of warmth around the corner.

Normally I put in my writing session first thing on Sunday morning. Then I write this blog and deal with other issues in the afternoon. But I’m changing that up today. I have a lot to get done, and I decided to knock out the blog first.

That means I don’t have my numbers for the week yet… or at the least I only have a small number to report.

Words

I only wrote one day this week. That seems to be my usual. I feel awful for a short week so I overdo it one week and then dip back down the next. That said, I do intend to get more numbers in later today.

The one session earlier in the week knocked out chapter 38, coming in at just shy of 2800 words. However, it did expose a mistake on my part.

Between revising the manuscript twice, and restarting twice I had to change up and do the outline different each time. BUT for the most part I had the same events. I just changed the order of chapters and the POV focus. What happened was that each time I rewrote the outline I would sometimes paraphrase some of the kept material. And this led to words or sections being left out of the new version (because I should remember the old version?)

Basically, I went off of outline and wrote this long chapter 36 and changed up where and when the events happened. And because I changed up those events, it rippled across chapter 37 (which seemed odd and didn’t work while I was writing it and I had to figure out what the heck was wrong with my outline. The fact that it was missing details from the first and second version was the problem). And also heavily messed up chapter 38.

I’m left with a dilemma. I have written everything to explain away the mistake…

I realize I might be too cryptic. Let me fill in some details.

The Set Up

The section was supposed to go: Group A goes up river toward the final fight scenes. A week or 10 days into their voyage they are ambushed by assassins and the boat goes down, cliffhanger.

Next chapter, a month later and group B (holding down the home fort) grows worried and is getting tired of being stuck doing nothing.

The chapter after that is supposed to jump to Group A having walked for over a week to their final destination. But the math doesn’t work out, and in the current version of the I used realistic travel and distances, hence the problem.

Research Issues

Despite this being a fantasy novel, I tend to do some research still and try to have things happen in a logical way. In the first version of the outline, I had the river travel mapped out day by day and decided it would take almost 2 weeks to get to the source of the river and the target. And I set the ambush up near the middle of the journey. But in the next two revisions of the outline, I went from a full paragraph of text, down to two sentences, down to a single “ambush on river, 10 days.”

Now, I forgot the original day by day outline in the first version, and because I like to do research, I tried to figure out how fast a flat river barge could be poled up a river like the Nile. I found that even a poled barge could make about 4 mph against the current. Add in that I have people rotating in to take a turn and that the barge is pushing day and night for ten days. Saying they go slower at night, and other factors, its close to 60 miles a day, possibly more. Real world Egypt is only 640 miles north to south… now my fantasy version is much larger. But the short answer is, in ten days my A-group is literally at the door of their enemy.

How do I go Forward?

So, I wrote these chapters and tried to make it work out. My B-group is still ahead on the timeline, but they technically are now past the end of the book, because all of the events in the city. The final fight, the showdown, the whatever you want to call it happened at least 2 weeks before that chapter, and traveling back down river to B-group takes half the time. 6 days at most.

The easiest solution is to change the one-month time hop to 2-3 weeks. But at 2 weeks it feels like that’s way too soon to be worried, and also way too soon to be bored with the situation B-Group is in. Three weeks is just about right to be worried as it makes them a few days late in returning. But that could be written off as trouble with travel and simply logistics.

Second Guessing and Worry

In any case, its not a major problem. The thing is, it makes me second guess myself and also makes me scramble to find all the previous notes and versions of my outline. In short, it makes me stop writing for the week as I agonize over the details and consider throwing out the version I just wrote and trying o write the version from my original notes.

Do I ambush A-group in the middle of their journey and then totally gloss-over a week plus of travel in hostile dangerous lands? That feels wrong. I spent the first third of the book slogging through the travel and showcasing everything that was happening. To suddenly just skip a whole bunch of that feels like readers would stop and ask why they sat through all the travel and issues in the first half of the book, only to have the last half of the book skip it.

Chapter 40 Problems

I feel like the solution I used works with only 1 minor problem about to arise. Chapter 40. I ended chapter 36 with B-Group both worried about A-Group and also about to abandon their post to go deal with another problem, when a character nonchalantly drops that they know everything that happened to A-Group. Cliffhanger, cut back to A-Group.

In Chapter 40 I’m supposed to return to B-Group who are still worried about A-Group. Only, they were told off camera what happened, and they’ve decided to abandon their post because of it. Chapter 40 happens before the reader gets to see what happened to A-Group. (38 resolves the ambush, 39 breaks the group into two smaller groups and sets them on their paths).

Solutions

Now I see two ways to go forward with Chapter 40:

#1 I move chapter forty to the end of the book and use B-Group to set up the next book in the series. Or:

#2 I tease the reader with nothing. The characters don’t talk about A-Group and merely get their own problems sorted, leave, and I try to build the tension further… only that doesn’t work so well as some of the people in A-Group need to leave with those characters.

Damn.

Believe it or not this was written freely without an outline and I just talked myself into the answer. I literally cannot have B-Group walk off the stage. Well, I’ll need to figure it out whether I go back and revise a few things, or if I plow forward and play with the timeline a little.

To be honest I might work on a new D&D character back story today rather than work on the novel… I know I’m such a shit. But it’s calling to me.

Outro

I thought about talking about that character but I don’t want to bore you all this week. Hopefully this helps some of you (all of you would be nice) and that you’re enjoying this journey with me. I really had thought I could crank out books a little faster, but forward is still forward. Progress.

Be well.