I know…I’m behind in blogging. It’s been crazy on both the writing and the personal front. However, I am slowly but surely making progress on Shadows of the Sun. I set myself a deadline of 3/31 to get the new outline done, and I was up until 11:30 that last night, but I finished. The outline I had used previously was some versions out of date, and in going through each scene again to write the blurb, I could mentally churn through my solutions and decide if they were actually what the book needed.

Ultimately, some fix plans grew stronger, some stayed the same, some changed entirely, and some were round filed as trying too hard :). I think I’m relatively well grounded in what I need to do, but this edit is going to be just as difficult as I imagined.

I have started working on the initial chapter, which has been rewritten more times than I can remember. This time, I’ve split it in half, added a new 1st scene and made serious changes to every single scene afterward :p. Four scenes complete so far. The first is new, the second changes the introduction of not one but two characters, in both cases to make positions and personalities clear. It’s rather sad when you know exactly what the characters are like but your readers tell you one is whiny and worthless and the other should be shot. I mean, I’m fine with shooting characters who deserve it, but these guys are the good guys!

So I hope I’ve done a better job on their introduction, and in doing that, made the reason another crucial plot moment occurred obvious rather than sloppy. I think I have, but I know these characters too well to say for sure, because I thought I had before too ;).

The bad part is that the book is already long. In fixing these bits, I’ve only made it longer. At this point I’m looking at shaving off 7k-8k in order to get to the overly long 125k. Sadly, I think this is going to be on the heavy side, but better a strong book than one that fits nicely in a word count slot. That’s not to say I don’t plan on one last pass for the sole purpose of shaving word count. If I can take a 5000+ short story down to 3500 for a contest, I can fix this. Now I ended up breaking the story rather significantly when I did that…something that luckily only required a four word fix…but at least I know I can do it.

In the new outline, there are only 2 brand new scenes to be added, though with all the other changes (most of them adding not cutting) I’ve got my work…umm…cut out for me :).

So, time to sleep so I can get some work done tomorrow.

And stats:
Edited Today: 2.282 words
2 Chapters complete – 5% of the novel
32 Chapters remain
126,236 Remaining word count
5,958 Current Total
132,838 Predicted Total