Not dead yet

At some point I want to do a post-mortem on the 1-year novel. But I'm still in editing so it is a bit early.

So far the biggest take-home is the methods basically worked but I need to problem-solve things in the Outline I didn't realize I needed to a the I wrote it. I'm not talking about a more detailed outline. The narrative style outline worked fairly well for this particular book. But I only outlined certain bones of the plot and left out other things that simply couldn't be retro-fitted in.

There is no strong antagonist who is present and visible through the story. There is no strong love interest, either. There are, worse than that, no reverses to the protagonist's personal relationships. She doesn't need to chose, betray, get betrayed, be surprised.

Well, mostly. I realized most of this early on and I worked to put as much as I could within the framework I had. So Vash and Herr Satz are at least somewhat interesting and get a bunch of interaction and both have an arc in their interaction with Penny that come to surprising conclusions.

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Editing is going quite well. So far. I did a lot of editing as I went, but that meant, progressively, I hit the early chapters more times than I hit the later chapters. So there are bigger holes in the later chapters. This is the main structural edit, not the grammar or voice pass. This is the one where I make sure the plot and themes and character arcs are as visible and sensible as possible.

So far I've mostly taken stuff out, in fact. Tightening in on the through lines. So anyway I'm at the 30K mark now, doing an easy but time-consuming edit in which I rip apart the dirndl scene to dialogue it out and shift some material from a later scene here instead, where I can dramatize it, too.

The next hole to repair is worse. That's the conclusion of the Vash arc. I've simplified what he's doing, but I haven't figured out what her plan is. That is a problem with the outline that is essentially inescapable; it pretty much had to say "Penny does something clever here."

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Ended up taking a couple of weeks away from the trumpet and that might have been a good thing because I came back with the clearest High C I've ever blown. Nice tone up there, finally. Now I'm working on taking the puff out of my cheeks. With my whiny new neighbor I've given up on practicing at home, even with the practice mute, so I'm bringing my sheet music to work instead.

I think I figured out why the high B and A are so vicious, too. First, you are blowing that high C partial to get up there, then valving down. Which means already you have to push a whole bunch of air, and when you valve it you are having to push it through even more tube and a lot more bends and squiggles. Plus of course the partials are getting far too close together (especially the "false" slot, which is right in the middle of those two notes).

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It is hot as heck and this marks six weeks since I started the levo or about due for a really bad slump. Well, I'm slumping. But I still got a half-day in at work. And editing.