Getting drafty

That is a ridiculous amount of progress for one day. Maybe, just maybe, I've finally made that breakthrough. Sometimes a Fox is standing at 6.5 thousand words right now...and I'm not even afraid of some of the big set-piece scenes that are coming up.

One of the cool things Scrivener does is allow you to take snapshots on a per-file basis.  These can be thrown back into the window at any moment or you can revert completely.

I had to seriously rethink and practically re-write from scratch pretty much everything post-prologue. This three day weekend was a gift from the gods. There's no way I could do this on an iPhone. I needed access to all that revision history, and my notes, and with Scrivener's ability to do split-screens and tear-offs I could fill all of my double monitor setup with words.

I ended up doing some crazy stuff with POV.

First off, I have the Hux-cam stuff I was sure I needed. And it is working; I quoted him whole for one section, but then I had mere excerpts interlaced with commentary and synopsis. Sort of what I did with Linnet's diary -- and if I do any more dual-time novels I'm going to need to break it up with some other way of showing the other time.

Second, I have Penny sort of doing flashbacks, but I've followed the rule I've used before; that it begins in past perfect, moves to past simple, then has an explicit transition back to the "current" past of the main narrative.

"I had walked..."

"I walked..."

"I walked some more..."

"I rubbed my legs, reminded of how sore I'd been after all that walking."

Then the POV stuff. So every book in this series opens with a snippet from Penny's show, done in third person in the "over the shoulder" version (no immersion.) For this book, I opened the first scene describing one of my major secondary characters in third person and only three paragraphs later mentioned my protagonist -- in third person, as if from the immersive POV of the secondary character.

Then revealed that it had been First Person all along. There were hints; there was a touch of narrative voice and an admission early on that the narrator was guessing, not actually knowing what Amelia was thinking.

But this still wasn't enough fun. I wanted to try to present the idea of this treasure hunt amid the artworks and monuments of Paris, to play it straight and make it fun, and showing Penny fiddling with the camera all the time was too distancing.

So I told it in straight first-person but that First Person narrator is being conscious of what it looks like. She is thinking in camera angles. She admits only once in the sequence that she is recording. Basically, this is presented as if you are watching a movie with a good POV, that makes you see and experience what the protagonist is seeing without calling attention to the artifice of the camera.

And then after a chapter break, I pull the curtain aside. For the scene at Sacre-Coeur Penny is now noticing the camera. The mechanics of what she is doing are made clear.

Through all of this, I had to hold my new priorities; to limit backstory and exposition as much as possible, to keep the fun of the visit and keep the treasure hunt as real as possible. So a ton of stuff was getting moved around (hence all those open windows).

And since I am all about flow, I pretty much opened up the description or dialogue I was borrowing from, and typed a fresh one that flowed better in the new scene I was creating.

Basically, I retyped 6.5 thousand words of novel. In a couple day's work.