Just finished Part III and there's only 15K or so left in the novel. But also, there's 15K of word-smithing and the final act of the novel and there's only two days left of the holiday vacation.
Some vacation, when it was cold and raining and everything was closed. Why can't we have that time off in spring instead?
I was starting to really crank. Got up to around a thousand words a day over the last few days. Part of that, though, is that a lot of things changed from outline to the actual scenes, and the choices that made sense for the "Duel" scene, Atlas, and the War Zone were all choices that simplified the scenes, took out the need for more research, and made the things shorter as well.
I'd been intending an epic climb back out of the silo. But as I wrote the scene, the emotional crux and the important story beat had already happened and I didn't need this for the story. And it didn't feel important enough to spend another day or two writing it, so I skipped over it.
(I have enough trouble finding enough to say about driving down a road through flat empty desert. Spending enough pages on climbing up rusty steel in the dark to make the scene feel properly epic? I don't feel up to it. How much can you write "right foot up, then left hand up?" I don't even enjoy playing it that much, in the increasingly obligatory "Uncharted" sequences.)
That may have been a mistake. In the War Zone, dealing with the place in any detail went too far aside from the main thrust of the plot and brought up too many directions I couldn't afford to go, so I ended up just doing a very surface-level depiction. No long conversations about the economic woes and the drug epidemic. Nothing at all about the sunny side of the neighborhood, the people living their lives there (increasingly, behind security gates); no attempt at a balanced or nuanced depiction.
Which also got rid of any need for a scene with "Michael Rennie" as he warns her not to go there, or cops with a similar warning, or a local who argues for a more nuanced view. Instead I could have a fairly simple asshole who gets right to the point, show it all from a single point of view, hand Penny the next clue and letting her move on to the next stage of the plot.
I think that was the right choice. I am much less sure about how the beats worked out in the Atlas scene, and that's why I think that instead of pushing through to get as much as I can of the Bar at the End of the Universe sequence written before vacation ends, I should back off and do some higher-level planning again.
When I wrote the first book of the series, I wrote a mid-act turn-around as an essential part of the structure. This is not uncommon. If you chose to sort the story beats into three boxes and call them "acts," there are two big changes of direction in the narrative occurring at the act breaks.
Act I introduces the elements of the story (setting, story, conflict). Act II can be said to begin when the protagonist first acts. This is when the problem is now clearly stated, and the cast begins to attack it. In the more Campbellian schemes, this is when the hero leaves their village and sets out into the world (or "enters the underworld" in Campbell's terms).
Act II is the middle of a paragraph or the middle of a symphony. It is where the themes are explored. Lots of "stuff" happens but the conflict does not get resolved. Saggy middle syndrome is baked in to the very structure of the story.
The II-III act change is when things change. What the protagonists were trying to do isn't working and they have to do something different. In more of a martial story, the bad guys have been attack, attack, with the heroes on the back foot, and II-III is when they come up with a plan to take the fight to them.
But then there's the strange one. There's a nadir, when the protagonist falls and everything looks hopeless. Then something happens (often a resolution of some other plot arc) and from here to the end of the story is the rising action and climax.
Which is why it usually (or something like this) happens in the middle of the act. Because you can't have the heroes only winning for all of Act III; that would be boring.
The place I went with many of the Athena Fox stories is that this crux, coming out of this nadir, is when Penny becomes most Penny. Sometimes pure Athena Fox, sometimes her own peculiar spin, it is the moment where she stops trying to win the stupid way, and commits to winning her way. It is the Darkwing Duck moment ("let's get dangerous") -- and that show followed that model quite closely.
I already knew going into Part III that I'd messed it up. Way back in the early outline, she would have gone a little crazy when Lon was found dead, have the "Footloose" clash at Blake's Lotaburger, and over the long long drive to WIPP do a bunch of soul-searching and be back in a place of sanity when she arrived. But I couldn't make the sequence of clues or even the geography work with her also visiting one of the Atlas-F sites near Roswell, much less my late-game decision to throw in Albuquerque's "War Zone."
(I was doing some clean-up at my favorite brunch place yesterday. Five minutes after a re-wrote the Jennifer Beale namedrop, "What a Feeling" came on their radio. Laughed out loud.)
So I've sort of scattered all the emotional beats and any act-like turn-around Penny could have across the entire act. And I feel like I could tighten it and make something where she really is bringing together the pieces and coming out of it stronger and more ready to finish the adventure.
At least there's no more long drives to write.
(An actual game on Steam. I'd get it -- four bucks -- but it is a dead game now, abandoned by the independent developer).
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