This week was spent on AoE, the next book, doing polishing and looking for opportunities to add fluff to fill out the descriptions. Let's call them fluffertunities. I've been through it once and most of a second time. Being YA, it's shorter than a Messengers book. Not as many fluffertunities came up as I wanted. I got too distracted with polishing and trying to track the days. The story's about a girl who's trapped in a virtual reality spy game. As part of the story, she has a 365-day benefit package she earned in the game the previous year. Along the way, the number of days she has left for the benefits is occasionally mentioned. This gives the reader a sense of the passage of time, and it gives me a way to track it, too. Keeping up with the passage of time can be a real problem. Some days can take multiple chapters. Some take a fraction of a chapter. When references to time show up in a story, it might be for the author as much as the reader. I expect to go through it one more time before sending it to test readers. This time I'm going to try to focus on the fluffertunities and not whether the words are "right".
Like last year, this has been a cool summer so far, because of all the rain and clouds. I didn't have to run the air conditioner in June at all. This week was the first time I've had to turn it on. There's no central air. It's a window unit. During the winter, I had an insulation panel in the window to keep the cold out. I took that off one night and turned the AC on. It worked great. The next day, I was eating something in the living room. My cat Cici looked up near the ceiling behind me, eyes open wide. It was really cute. I thought she heard something outside that was reflecting off the wall. Then I heard it, too. I looked around to see a big, black snake climbing the wall.
Apparently, something was loose at the bottom of the air conditioner in the window sill. I fixed it later. It took about an hour and a half to figure out how to get the snake back outside. It was five or six feet long. You never want to look around behind you and see a snake, especially indoors especially high up on the wall. Fortunately, it was very passive and easy to work with relatively speaking. It didn't strike at the mop handle and piece of spare baseboard like they do on television. I finally got it into a laundry hamper and carried the hamper outside with the end of the baseboard. Whew. I didn't need the stress.
Book2. How do I fix it? That's a good question. Part of the problem with it is it's set 3.5 years after book 1. I'm thinking about moving the timeline back to maybe 3.5 months after book 1. Or at least closer. That eliminates the need to fill in the backstory for the last 3.5 years. I thought the backstory slowed things down and felt awkward at times. On the other hand, Joe and Ceinwen, Etan and Kayley, and Marion and Genia all have kids after 3.5 years. If I move the timeline, what about the kids? There's a whole subplot around them. They were really important to the story. Could I really have the girls running around fighting the forces of darkness while pregnant? That might be clunkier than 3.5 years of backstory.
So, I've put some thought into different ways to approach it, but it might require fundamental changes to the story. However, I think I can keep a good bit of it such as the political and military situations. When certain things occur isn't very important as long they do occur. It's going to take more thought.
Have a great weekend.
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