Cosmic, Man

I just got done editing the scene where Penny talks with the half-crazy "idea man" of the cult. He calls himself Uchū, which is a reference so subtle no reader will ever get it to one of Lupin III's sidekicks.

So that brings me almost up to where I stopped to do a massive re-write. A lot of re-arranging. Today I realized the scene where Ichiro drives her up belongs before the rewritten scene in the ryokan. Which meant going through and changing or taking out entirely all the "are we in a hurry" stuff as well as, of course, all the indications of which direction they were driving.

And I was doing clean-up on the transition between the first meeting with Deacon to the first day in what Penny is calling the "Cabinet of Curiosities" and I realized I couldn't have Aki-on-headset with those lines of dialogue because I'd turned off the headset in a previous scene!

So I needed to move those lines to a different place. And that left so little left in that scene I chopped off the last bit, trimmed it down, and dropped it into the next chapter. Then combined the remains of Aki's speech with a completely different Aki conversation and condensed all that down. Saved two or three pages at the end of it, and managed to work in a bit that was originally going to take yet another scene.

(And as I wrote the above, I realized I hadn't gotten around to editing the "not wearing the earbud" bit to make it clearer Aki wasn't going to appear in that chapter. Done now! That bit was easy...)

I've cut a few thousand words. And better, it hasn't been all condensing. I've dropped several bits that weren't important enough. Today's big task was basically going over and over and over the big conversations about archaeology and throwing out as much as I could each time.

The big Uchū scene has tried to be a polemic on the stupidity of Ancient Astronauts, or a pean to human ability, multiple times. I keep writing those bits then taking them out. Paleolithic art work, Gothic cathedrals, Theosophists...all wonderful and all part of the process I went to coming up with this whole plot, but the scene didn't need it.

The last stretch for tonight's race was wrapping up the scene without Uchū saying anything that would make Penny think of kusanagi. Because she'd never let it go. So each time the conversation naturally went in that direction I had to prune it back and try again.

Will I make it by the end of September? Not with beta reads. But I think I will. I am finally starting to be able to do some of this stuff faster, if not necessarily more efficiently.