Back in the words, and loving it. Currently working through scenes I identified in my structural audit that needed adjustment.
What does that mean?

Well in some cases when reviewing the structure of the story I could see that a key scene’s intensity needed to be raised. Think of a scale, if it was only a 3 it might need to be a 5 or a 6 in the context of where the story was.

Other scenes that just aren’t needed or are wrong for the story need to be re-written or removed.

While it took me longer than I wanted (or expected) to go through the structural editing the value now is very clear. Each day I pick off a scene and rewrite it to make the changes.

It’s so tempting to adjust other parts of the scenes as I read through, such as sentence structure or grammar, but I know at this point that getting the storyline to be complete is the key to getting this book published.

Key Work of late:

• Editing scenes
• Researching dyes, chalk, home cloth making in times gone by
• Adding more world building content to my encyclopedia of my world

Major advances in settling key issues around my protagonist and her story line have been made in the previous weeks, as part of edit 2. This was significant but slow moving.

It has taken me a lot more time to get my head around resolving key issues in fiction, verse my non-fiction. I have been enjoying learning every week on how best to attack the issues, and instead of writing, editing, writing, editing and never getting pleased with the work, taking time to understand what it is that’s wrong with a certain scene or arc is making it much easier to resolve.

I bounce between Robert Mckee’s Story, John Truby’s Anatomy of a story and Shaun Coyne’s Story Grid as my tools of choice in resolving the story elements. Time will tell if it has worked.

Key work of late:

• outlining missing scenes required for antagonists story
• researching elements relating to antagonists story lines
• adding depth to key placements in world affecting book 1 and 2
• editing scene chronology and placement