Progress Report, in which I demonstrate the butterfly effect

Those last drop-ins I was talking about in the previous installment did indeed prove tricky.  I combed through the first seventy or so pages of the manuscript, searching for the proper places to insert the tweaks to my protagonist.  That proved more time consuming than the actual prose work.  In the end, I only inserted a few new lines here and there, and made a few tweaks to existing material.  But I must say I think just those little bits of new and revised verbiage make a significant difference.

jaylake

,

threeoutside

, and I were discussing this at the last Omaha Beach Party gathering–the way minute adjustments can fix major problems.  Call it a butterfly effect for writers.  Only time and reader feedback will tell, of course, whether the changes I’ve made have solved the characterization issues I was trying to address.  But I feel pretty good about them at the moment.  As I was working on these drop-ins, I realized they gave my protagonist his own agenda from the very beginning, something he really didn’t have in the first draft.  As the story develops, as events unfold that imperil his life, another agenda–survival–emerges.  But without this bit at the beginning, he seems too willing to just go where he’s sent, and too ambiguous about the life he’s chosen.  Now, he’s more his own man, fully aware of what’s wrong with the system in which he’s enmeshed–and he has a plan for addressing it.  Naturally, that plan goes awry . . . and therein lies a tale.

This week, I hope to do some work on the Sekrit Projekt, and get started on the rewrite of my Halloween contest story from last year.

Write Club updates:

After following up with the good folks at Aeon, I learned that the rejection for “Light Chimes” had, as I feared, gotten lost in the ether.  Actual response time is unknown.

Clockwork Phoenix called “The Judgment of Harris” “interesting” and “well-written,” but not for them.  Response time, 9 days.