7/26/2019
I made it work! That sounds terrible to say, like if I had to “make” it work, then it shouldn’t have been there in the first place. But damnit, writing is pretty much nonstop making things work. As much as I hate editing, there’s a real beauty to it when you see how the story evolves and gets better. Like “hello good story! I knew you were in there somewhere!” Polish that turd, people.
I had to go back to Ch 20 and add a couple of paragraphs to head off the “Medea’s reading his mind” issue. Now Nikolai at least has the tools to block her. Although she did leave those tools where he can find them, so who’s to say how effective they are?
Approaching the midpoint in my revisions. I’m definitely considering moving the Predator/Prey chapters to book 2. When I wrote the sequence I had writer’s block, and I used the old trick “have your protagonist get attacked by monkeys/ninjas.” In my case, Nikolai gets jumped by witch hunters. It’s a fun sequence that shows his darker side as he has no real reason to hold back. The scene did indeed help me get over the block and provided a great segue for bullet training (which has since been punted to book 2).
The problem is it doesn’t fit the throughline for book 1, and would actually fit the story for book 2 a lot better. When I started writing this series I had a general idea of how many books it would take and what would be in each. But I hadn’t yet written a novel. I worried about having enough content for book one. As I started writing, I realized that book 1 had content for like three books. When all is said and done, my projected 8-book series may end up being longer. I hope I can streamline my writing/editing process over the next few years so I can get them out at a decent rate.
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