We’re into the battle scenes now.
I also realized this draft may not be the last one. I’ve gone from not having enough for a book to having to much. Which leads me to a conundrum. Do I take a lot of the added-in stuff and break it into a separate novel? Or do I simply consider it background and write a shorter version again?
A story this size brings with it an unwieldy number of POVs. Add too many, and the reader will get lost. Trim too many, and the story has huge gaps. I’m thinking I need to roll this back to JT and Davra, to cut out some of the storylines as well. Maybe three POVs and some odd ones from the other characters or one-offs. The nice thing is a shorter rewrite won’t take as long. I’ll have to let it sit and simmer when I finish later this week.
And then it’s time to focus on work I know will pay, either by contract or acceptance. I have a scifi ghostwriting project. It doesn’t pay much, but it’s an opportunity to pick up someone else’s ball and run with it. The other is Holland Bay. No, I haven’t sold the Jim Winter crime magnum opus yet. But a well-respected small press has asked to read it. And I have three open agent queries still out there waiting for a response or an expiration date. (I give them 12 weeks. If they come back later, a rejection is irrelevant, and an acceptance is only a good thing.) So when this monster is done, I need to get a follow up outlined. I need to rewrite the new Kepler novel I wrote. (Draft 1 is for my wife. Draft #2 is for a potential publisher.)
And I need to get some short stories out there. One of the reasons I have trouble selling is that there’s nothing luring readers in. That needs to change.