Storming Again

Paper head
CC 2010 Drew Coffman

I’ve talked about how Storming Amargosa is a mess, a big glorious mess!

Whipping it into shape is going to be a summer-long project. Earlier this year, I added scenes to wrap up some storylines that are sort of left dangling in the next two unreleased novellas. I have some idea why it takes George RR Martin so long to finish installments of Song of Fire and Ice. (However, 11 years is a bit long, and after next Sunday’s Game of Thrones, I really won’t care. HBO did the job for him.)

So I did a reread of the manuscript recently. Now I’m reading it again. The first read-through was fun. This one… Not so much. The internal inconsistencies are glaring. For instance, there’s a plan to use assault shuttles to invade Amargosa, and the make-up of their teams keeps changing up to the actual invasion. Names change. What characters know from scene to scene actually goes backward in places.

And there’s a whole political thing on Earth that our favorite Compact douchebag, Leitman, is manipulating into place. Sometimes, it impacts the events my five meddling kids get involved with. Sometimes it doesn’t. By necessity, this is a multi-POV story, and I really have to watch what gets cut.

Fortunately, after this reread, I’m going on vacation. Let the real work begin in June.