Failure

I finished the New Mexico book. Most of the things I was trying for...didn't happen.

I wanted in this one to fill the pages with empty desert and open road. I wanted to luxuriate in those descriptions, and give Penny space to clear her head. On the mystery itself, I didn't want her usual friends and supporters (or her increasingly complicated back story). I wanted her isolated emotionally as well as physically.

It didn't happen.

First off, backing away from her expertise meant I was trying to describe desert when she couldn't even name or recognize a Saguaro cactus. And she couldn't talk as much about the complex and fascinating history, because, well, she didn't know enough of it.

Worse, having her in an unfamiliar place meant I fell right back into having people explain it to her.

I made the people she interacted with unfriendly but they still ended up helping despite themselves, because that's the nature of a mystery. You have to get the clues somehow. And turns out, not being supportive and friendly is not the same thing as not having an emotional connection. Lon is annoying, Mary angry and sarcastic, and Dylan blissed out but she's still emotionally involved with them. There's even an arc.

As usual, the space was too big. All I wanted at the central core was to juxtapose nuclear secrets with the first humans in the Americas. But I couldn't leave the Native Americans out of either story. And that brings in frontier history and the cowboy stuff is something parts of New Mexico wears on its sleeve anyhow.

And set loose someone who still has to be weaned from snarky internal monologue crammed with pop-cultural references, and there are gonna be a lot of cracks being made about, well, everything. (Besides that, "be mean to Penny" for the characters Lon and Mary ended up being a lot of "be snarky," so I've got pop culture and trivia coming from three directions or more.)

The mystery didn't chunk as well as it should have, either. My idea was to make each clue a distinct moment that drops hard, that feels like the plot advances, and that often changes the ground. I mean, there are places it sort of worked. Realizing UFO nuts were yapping about the radioactive body in the desert changed the mystery of that body, and sent Penny on a road trip towards Roswell.

But the mystery wasn't quite deep enough to provide many of those moments. Same problem with using the mystery for the long drives; there wasn't enough to puzzle over. Worse, the changes in how the story plays out, like Penny having to go walk through an illegal dump site with a Geiger counter, or getting side-swiped by a Hummer and fleeing in near-panic, were constrained by the mechanics of plot and geography.

I spent weeks trying out different combinations, and none of them really made the plot clunk along like the intermittent gear I wanted it to be. Instead the physical aspect, the change in the world, the emotional moment and, oh yeah, the progress in the mystery didn't track that well.

But it is done. Or at least, the second or third draft is done (I revise as I go).

I've been looking for developmental editors and/or beta readers. Finally dropped a hundred on Fiverr for one of the latter, because it costs almost as much to use ProWritingAid's AI. So at worst case...I'm overpaying. A weird one. Her communications were exceedingly casual (as in, not even trying to spell simple words).

But not as weird as the Dev I'm talking to at Reedsy. Reedsy requires a sample, he told me he was going to mark that up as an example of his work. That's more than what was expected. However; he returned an rtf without tracking, highlighting, or other marks of what he did. It took me a while to notice he'd gone and added a scene break, and a chapter break. It took me longer to find out he'd added one sentence (again, without marking it in any way). A sentence explaining the joke (or possibly being really literal-minded) about one of Penny's pop-culture drops.

This is not what developmental edit usually is. On the scale where proofreading is at one end, this is about as close to the other as you can get. Developmental is looking at the big picture, of story arcs and character arcs, of plot and theme, of world-building. Moving around chapter breaks might come out of it, but that's not really what it is about. Also, editing is about discussion. Editors mark their changes, or suggest a change be made. They don't insert a new sentence.

It seems to me I've been through this before. There are reasons other than being stubborn or stingy as to why I've ended up doing my own so often.

(I told my cover artist to stop trying to understand the difference between Mexico and New Mexico, and I'd try to draft something myself. Yeah.)