Becalmed

Still haven't finished the boat scene and it is really starting to get to me. I want this novel edited and on to beta readers, polish edit, and cover.

Partly I'm dead in the water because I'm personally under the weather. Again. I'm shivering with fatigue right now and my concentration is barely up to the level of a blog post. And too many of my hours need to go towards catching up at work.

And I'm being too conscious of plot holes. This is a scene where I might be able to explain how my convenient antagonist is able to be so convenient. The timing is really tricky, though.

That, and every time I think about how he works and what clues I need to drop for my protag to pick up, I am tempted to rewrite the other scenes in which he acts. Done so already; this is one of the big structural elements this edit is about, after all. I've already done a bit to move the first antag, the "dragon" character, to a better visibility where his goals actually sort of make sense to the reader. And I'll have no problems moving around the few tiny plants for the final boss. But this guy...he's an ongoing problem.

Not helped by the fact that he has no lines, he never gets named, and in the majority of the scenes in which he appears my protagonist either doesn't see him or doesn't realize she's looking at him.

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Yeah, and the boat scene has a couple of other issues. One that is bugging me more and more is I conceived it -- heck, I thought of putting it in the book at all -- because I was going to base it on the boat I took from Piraeus to Iraklion. Well, it is really hard to figure out just what kind of boat actually leaves from Venezia (most tourists doing the Italy-to-Greece route go out of Ancona and most also stop off at Igoumenitsa before going on to Patras.)

The actual line is only interested in selling tickets, and the little bits of data they can provide are strictly for upcoming trips. Since I'm setting this story in the shoulder season, I had to work fast and pick up the reservation data. The only videos I've found seem to be from mid-season, as well.

But with all that said, the chance is great that these are bigger, fancier, newer ships than the one I was on, and more of a tourist crowd (there were a lot of working class riders on the one I was on).

So change it or not? I don't know.

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And, yeah, the emotional arcs and the necessary character evolution through this sequence is also still a little weird. I think I know what I need to know but it is still proving hard to fit it all in.

Did I mention I still find this character hard to work with? She's so energetic, and relentlessly upbeat. The first was a consequence of having someone in their early 20's who knew a ton of history and also had an acting background and did video. The second just sort of happened; started from being all excited about being in a historical place (the Acropolis) and then the plot required she do a fast rebound from her first "accident" and basically this is a person who rarely mopes, moans, beats herself up over her mistakes, or fears what is ahead.

I had a much easier time writing for Samantha Nishimura, also First-Person, although I took her in different ways than the game she had appeared in. She had great mood swings, up and down -- and swore constantly through it.

I think, now that I've been working with it through the length of a novel, that one of the tools Third Person gives you is the ability to draw the camera back a little ways when you need to give the reader more of a cool assessment. Third Person gives you that ability to control how close the narrative understanding is to the character understanding, and it can change from moment to moment.

First Person, on the other hand, is always in the moment. Everything gets filtered through their eyes. The only equivalent tool with First Person is you can let them draw back a little with an emotional distance, more visibly telling the story to the reader and less experiencing the story as it happens.