A Red Road

I was not looking forward to working on this chapter. There's a lot of expositional prose in here and as with much of my early work, it is both a little weaker and a little less correct than the rest of the book. I thought I needed to explain more than I did. Sometimes I exposit in ass-covering fashion, so when people are like "When is that mentioned?" I can say well, Lasche referes to it briefly here. But putting in one sentence thousands of words earlier than ideas come into the story-proper really isn't useful to casual readers. Usually it represents insecurity in my storytelling, lack of faith in my readers or the desire to display that yes-I-had thought-of-that. I was envisioning lots of chopping of lots of writing that I was embarrassed to admit to having written. Dread!

It didn't go as badly as I expected. I was able to delete most of the patches that were awkward, even if it took me trying to rewrite a few of them before deciding they just couldn't be saved. Best of all, I decided to surrender a little on the issue of tense continuity. I'm getting TWaBW proofread professionally before I start shopping the manuscript around, so someone else can ref the "this versus that" battle royale. It was getting in the way of my creative process, and that's what professional helpers are for: Fixing what they are great at fixing, so you can do what you're supposed to be doing. I am the peanut butter, they are my jelly.

One dead darling: I can’t even recall if I was in my right mind or not on that given day; I was drunk a lot back then.

Man, I loved that sentence. What an achy little punch. But the person he's telling the story to doesn't need to hear it because, well, that's for Book 2. Out it goes.

And a chunk that's a little riskier to remove: There were four other places like it back in those days: the ones out east in Haman and Hoen, the one down the way in Suthy and the one up north in that armpit, Greengate. I’d been working out of the capital for seven or eight months, as it was the biggest. They knew me there, by then, which was the best way to get paid quick.

I like seeing Haman and Hoen set next to each other like this, but that's beside the point. This was in the description so that I could name all the major cities in the first chapter of the book. But, I really don't like how dispersed this makes the Talent collection program. I need it to be more localized and tighter; knowledge is power, and power is a big deal. Gone.

Tomorrow is Friday and I'm into Larkin's first chapter, much revised already. I've got targeting reticules locked on removing some bloated darlings (I'm looking at  you, descriptions of food) and smooth sailing the rest of the... oh, wait... there's my first-ever attempt at world-building in this chapter, isn't there? Damn. I might need to kick-and-punch this, now that I have some golden perspective on which details matter. Onward!