On to Atlantis!

The writing finally started happening. In fact, it is happening so well right now I'm tempted to take a chunk of the week off work to keep at it. 5.5K in the can now, and ready to hit the crazy chapter at the Atlantis Gallery.

Sure, I was able to save a bunch of text from the previous draft. But there was a lot of re-arrangement and quite a lot of new stuff from scratch. I think I've accomplished a pretty good balance on the opening chapter; showing the situation, making it interesting in the moment but also laying the ground for later chapters, showing the character enough to make her interesting and also leaving the right amount of mystery for later.

I decompressed the opening prologue some, and shifted around the "asides" to make them work better. It is a strange thing I'm trying there; basically this is a fake-out opening, showing the adventurer archaeologist in action only its actually a budget video. I really shied from the usual approaches, like doing it all in italics, but I did want to clue in the reader and, rather more importantly, slip in some background information. So I've reserved the italics for a pair of disembodied voices that comment on the action.

Anyhow. Been messing around with some new approaches to keeping track of the text I shift around. Anything I delete, I shift to a save folder just in case the original was better. I set up macros to color blocks of text, which I'm currently using as green for desired additions, red for things that should probably be deleted, and blue for general commentary.

The problem I think I have is that I treat prose too much like it was, say, lyrics. By which I mean the flow and the rhythm mean too much to me. I've read about writers who block in a scene using vague, general terms then fill in the details later. I can't do that. The difference to me between a Mercedes or a Lincoln as a background detail is not just what each might say about period, location, economic status, but which fits the meter of the surrounding line, brings the sentence to the proper length, has the right vowel sounds.

Which means I really don't have the luxury of skipping over something with a RESEARCH LATER tag and coming back to it after I have a draft in the can. Also, when it comes to details of location and technology and similar, the action IS the thing. I need to know before I write the scene if the character is carrying an axe or a sword, because a sword can go into a scabbard but an axe is going to be awkwardly in their hand the whole time unless there's a sentence there about them setting it down.

So the next chapter may turn out to be really, really annoying. Because there's a free-wheeling conversation that jumps from one thing to another the way conversations do. I know the places I want to go and the personalities involved but not the order or the Traveling Salesman algorithm that takes the conversation where I need it to go.