Got through the last rethink and back to writing the last act.
Was good timing to stop and think right then. There's stuff that's going to be moved to the third act and emphasized, so is nicer to be able to have it in the draft instead of trying to put it in later. The Dorians are back. It ain't a great archaeological mystery but it is the one I have so I'm not putting it to bed until the last scene.
I'm a little disheartened by how much editing I'm looking at now.
On the other hand I am starting to feel like I'm really getting a grip on what a novel looks like and how to build one. This is my third go-around so that's about right. The first I abandoned a few chapters from the end. It just didn't feel "enough." The second I think has the minimum elements. There is little character development but there is still some internalized conflict stuff that plays out properly. The world building is also simplistic but sufficient.
Oh, yes, and there were two epic-length fanfics in there. They helped a lot with scene-level and chapter-level work and were great experiences in juggling large ensemble casts.
What I'm dealing with now is the large-scale structural forms and how to hold them in your head and work with them and maintain flow and consistency across the length of a novel.
So third person might have been a better choice. I went first person largely because there are a lot of solo scenes and it makes it easier to keep an internal narrative voice going. Of course in my current round of re-writes I'm adding characters to as many of those solo sequences as I can because it just reads better.
There's two places third person would have really helped. There's a character who is a foil and goad through the first two thirds. He's the one that pushes my protagonist to change. Why he is doing so is unclear up until his last scene. And that's weak. He would be a stronger antagonist if he didn't appear magically and do things for incomprehensible reasons. And the best way to do this would be to have the ability to go inside his head once or twice, or at least look at the world from over his shoulder.
Changing first person is more awkward and less done than changing third person. In the ultimate case, third person omniscient dips into every head it wants to, moment by moment (and is rarely used in genre fiction these days).
The other thing is, well, it is tough to objectify a character from first person. Conan can stride into battle, sweat gleaming from his mighty thews, but he can't describe himself doing it (well, not without sounding like Den (as voiced by John Candy in 1981's Heavy Metal). As I discovered earlier, it is harder to look heroic from inside, especially for a character who doesn't think of herself as being that hero and from her perspective is faking it like mad.
And, yes, this is mirror territory, where you really shouldn't be writing in deep immersion but letting the character admire their long raven locks. In the first novel I actually finished, Shirato, I played around with starting with a shallow immersion and external description when the character had yet to break away as an independent person standing slightly outside of her own society. And I could certainly play that game here, with Penny being described from behind her eyes but even she views Athena Fox from outside her skin.
Of course you can always pick up a POV if you need that external shot. On my last fanfic I even created a one-scene walk-on just to be able to observe the Jack-Daniel-Lara dynamic from the outside for a few paragraphs.
Yes, I certainly played with the idea of having Penny narrate in first person but describe the character she plays in third. But something I've realized as I'm closing in on the final chapters; Penny doesn't want to be this character. She wants to be this person. She doesn't want to be a a genre hero who has adventures, she wants to be the globe-trotting, confident, skilled academic who knows history deeply and can speak a dozen languages living and dead. For this novel, at least, it isn't appropriate for her to ever describe her own actions from outside.
There's an amusing discussion going on in a couple corners of the interwebs about how so many fantasy worlds (especially in games) are littered with the ruins of a past civilization and whether we should be calling them post-apocalyptic. (The other part of the argument is the banditry and the rule of the sword and the easy access to loot seems to imply a breakdown of society).
The view has some merit, I think, but only as in describing the settings of games as borderlands. Places that for whatever reason (past cataclysm or current war) are lawless and in flux and are in short the perfect habitat for the kind of character sometimes described as a "murder-hobo."
As for the ruins? You can certainly argue for there to have been a lost age, but I don't see it as singular. I see it more as deep history. Peoples have come and gone, and some of them had pretty crazy building programs.
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