Wool gathering

I knew this was the big chapter as far as editing time went. And I shouldn't have been surprised that the reasons I thought it would take a while were not the reasons it did take a while.

This is a stand-alone sequence, a set-piece location. The course of my MC's flight has been the dig in Germany, train and Munich, train and Padua, Venice. And now the car ferry which concludes the side quest.

So, yeah. It is a big boat so a nice complicated set with places to hang out, hide, climb, fight, whatever. It is based on somewhere I spent about twelve hours on. And there's an under-text of The Odyssey and even though he never strayed into the Adriatic (he was all over Sicily, landed in Italy at least once, and might have made it as far as Spain) it is still a great excuse to do some stuff.

So I figured I'd be plotting all sorts of shenanigans. And I did work out some and started to write.

Well, it didn't work.

Fortunately I have a tool in my kit, a tool I'm calling "increasing the size of the boxes." I just kept asking the question above the question, the question that contained the question, until I figured out the character arcs and story arcs and emotional arcs were going in the wrong directions. What I kept trying to do on the boat was wrong for the character and the story.

The thing that really bugged me was going through the weekend -- a time when I can usually sit down at the keyboard and slam a few thousand words of text -- doing nothing but gnawing away at the problem.

So now I know. It isn't perfect. Writing is always a balance of compromises. At one point in the various attempted drafts I had some background about one of my antagonists. Well, it doesn't work here but now I know I need it so I'll need to offload it onto some other scene.

And I've added one more character. Terry, who owns a 32' cabin cruiser and is a very friendly drunk.

To go with (deep breath): Biro, Océane and Phillip, "Spooky," Andreas, Ariadne, Giulio, Signor Nardella, Howard, Dame Dupond, Jim, Vash, Drea, Graham, Doctor Newman, "Herr Satz," Robert, Gerta, Kaylah and her buds, Barker, "Polpetto," Markos, Eric, "Socrates," Demetrius, Georgios, Goku, "Outis," and Diana. In the list of named characters, that is.