Cobbling it All Together

PS - The formatting looks awful, I know. I am having issues with blogger.com. Hopefully I will get fixed soon.

While it may not look like it on the surface, I've been actively working on the novel. In terms of real pages completed, I've cleaned up the first two chapters and added additional content to carry forward several threads that have been added. The plan is to read those two chapters during the next writer's group meeting. Most of the work, however, has been under the hood. Several main characters have been better fleshed out with detailed descriptions about their backgrounds and personalities. I also spent considerable time mapping out a chapter by chapter synopsis. That's been a lot of work, but I'm pretty happy with the initial results. The chapter synopsis is my guide. As a result of that work, I was able to tighten the story arcs considerably. The thirty chapters of the latest completed version of the novel has been compressed into eighteen chapters. I hope the changes will move the story along at a faster, more exciting pace.

The book doesn't end at the eighteenth chapter. I have synopses of new chapters nineteen and twenty completed, and I'm not quite done yet. Don't panic, though, a great deal of the original content is still there, so it's not like I'm re-writing the whole thing. Content has been moved around and unnecessary pieces have been set aside (ie, things that don't progress the story). There is a lot of writing still to be done, but a good bit of it is just tying the moved around pieces together and adding connections to the new threads I'm weaving in. I am currently walking through the main threads looking for consistency and relevance. One of my problems is that I've changed my mind a number of times about how some things work that are pretty critical to the story, and I have to nail those things down and get on with it.

 Let me use a real example. One fundamental element of the story changes considerably. That change concerns Flea. The character, Flea, was never really fully defined. What is he, exactly? Currently, Flea appears both as a young man and as a musical instrument, a mandolin. The explanations for this phenomenon are lacking in the story, and that creates confusion. Taking a step back, I had to look at the idea of Song and it's effect when present and when absent. Song comes from the Well of the Worlds on Chord. It doesn't reach Spark. However, Song does exist on Spark. Flea is a creature of Chord, stolen from Caretaker Melody by Mela-nnee, and taken to Spark. Flea IS Song, which makes him both precious and dangerous. This new Flea does not play music or transform into a musical instrument. Flea is a sentient receptacle of Song in the shape of a young man. What more he might become will unfold over the course of the story.