Well, I’d hoped to finish the new chapter I started last week on Saturday, but I didn’t quite get there. I did finish today, though, so I was almost on target.
The main reason I didn’t get there on Saturday was that I discovered as I edited one of the key scenes in the chapter a logical blunder that couldn’t be fixed without deleting a chunk of the scene and starting over. It was frustrating and annoying, but this kind of thing sometimes happens. Of course, it is better to catch and address these things early on, at the draft stage, then to have an editor point them out later – or worse, a reader, should such things slip past everyone and make it into the book!
It’s not necessary for every reader to believe or ‘buy’ the rationale for every character’s choices and actions, but it is best if those rationales are at least defensible. That ‘this person might well act this way even if I wouldn’t’ is something you hope every reader can agree with on some level. I think the scene I was working on, as rewritten, now carries at least plausibility, which I think it lacked before.
I now have a prologue and 21 chapters of my draft. According to my outline, I have about 20 more chapters to go. You can see from the ‘progress bar’ on the top right of this page that I’ve passed the midway point in terms of the number of words/pages I expect to write, so the second half is officially underway. A pace of a chapter a week can have me finished by June. We’ll see how that goes…
Yes, it’s always better to catch the mistakes right off the bat… I still laugh when I read some books. “So now the character did WHAT?”
Exciting! I can’t wait for another update.