Lost my voice

The book is boring me. Of course that's going to happen. One of the great generally un-celebrated skills of the author is to keep going through the slump. Which usually sets in by the middle of the book and only gets worse from there. 

Today I stumbled on a paragraph that's quite early on. I was going to paste it in here but I can't find it. Just as well. Basically, Penny's voice is what TVTropes calls "Sophisticated as hell." Bookish, immediately followed by Buffy-speak. Thing is, a couple reviewers got on me about the last book having too terse a feel to it. So I was consciously trying to do longer sentences.

And I don't know why, but that means I'm ending up with the labored, bookish stuff more often than I should. It is good for an effect; there's this droll, rather English understatement when you use ten-dollar words to describe a man with a gun jumping out at your hero.

But you can't use it everywhere, and I feel like I am starting to.

Anyhow...I sent off a request to six Fivers...or was that five Sixers...and one of them is taking fifty bucks off me to read the first ten thousand words. We'll see how helpful that is. (Getting a top-to-toe developmental edit read -- aka beta reader with better note-taking skills -- start at around 1.5K. That's US dollars.)

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So other than that, I'm slamming words now. 9K into the final part of the book, and 4K of that I wrote TODAY. And I'm still going; 250 words into the "sneaking" scene as I break for dinner.

I did manage to lose the notes I'd taken on kusanagi no tsurugi. I had something that gave a sense of the number of possible copies that had been mentioned in different sources, and more usefully, a rather nice quote from I think it was Go-Daigo about how kusanagi isn't Excalibur. Not that he put it that way; just that owning the sword didn't make you Emperor of Japan, and being without the sword didn't make the Emperor not the Emperor.

I did find the Constitutional Peasants scene and watched that again, of course. Farcical aquatic ceremonies, etc. Incidentally, the Emperor has ANOTHER sword which he damn well does wear, and it's almost as ancient, but despite what my critics say I really do leave more stuff out than I put in.

Heck, for the purpose of this story, they are just "ninja." Nobody has even breathed the whole Shinobu thing...and lets not even try to talk about kunoichi and the whole strange fanciful etymologies THAT gets into.

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Paris has been going slowly. I've been contemplating something that would let me tell large parts of the novel in third person. That's how tired I am of trying to write in Penny's voice.