Back to the plot!
31 January 2019 08:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeI've finally got to the end of plot point seven! Raoul has successfully encountered the d'Artois expedition (and we meet d'Artois himself; I like him already) and we are Back On Track for the first time in eleven whole months, after a truly massive deviation around my self-created plot hole.
I'm not sure I'm likely to write any faster as a result, but at least I now have the satisfaction of being able to tick off my progress against the original list of summary points again. I just hope this enormous action/adventure insert doesn't totally kill the pacing of the story, bore the audience to tears and cause everyone to forget all about poor Christine, last seen disappearing into the wilds in the imminent expectation of pursuit by Erik.
It's very hard to judge how the pacing goes when you're writing so incredibly slowly (fifteen thousand or so words at one or two sentences a day). I think the 'character' sections of it were quite good, and I hope I managed to struggle through the necessary plot mechanics without too much obvious info-dumpage -- what does strike me on re-reading is the way in which I consciously avoided any description of how exactly they went about patching the hull in the first place, by sending Raoul off to work the pumps while it was going on. And if it strikes me as odd, it will probably strike the readers too :-(
But even at that pace there were definitely an awful lot of chapters in it, compared to the earlier part of the story with only one or so chapters per plot point...
Anyway, it's DONE.
I'm not sure I'm likely to write any faster as a result, but at least I now have the satisfaction of being able to tick off my progress against the original list of summary points again. I just hope this enormous action/adventure insert doesn't totally kill the pacing of the story, bore the audience to tears and cause everyone to forget all about poor Christine, last seen disappearing into the wilds in the imminent expectation of pursuit by Erik.
It's very hard to judge how the pacing goes when you're writing so incredibly slowly (fifteen thousand or so words at one or two sentences a day). I think the 'character' sections of it were quite good, and I hope I managed to struggle through the necessary plot mechanics without too much obvious info-dumpage -- what does strike me on re-reading is the way in which I consciously avoided any description of how exactly they went about patching the hull in the first place, by sending Raoul off to work the pumps while it was going on. And if it strikes me as odd, it will probably strike the readers too :-(
But even at that pace there were definitely an awful lot of chapters in it, compared to the earlier part of the story with only one or so chapters per plot point...
Anyway, it's DONE.
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Date: 2019-01-31 09:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-31 10:47 pm (UTC)HAH!
Rough chapter/page count for Christine/Erik section: 9 chapters, 55 pages @500 words/page (27,500 words approx in chapters of ~3000 words)
Rough chapter/page count for Raoul section: 2 chapters, 12 pages @500 words/page + 3 extra pages @300 words/page, followed by another 5 chapters and 58 pages @300 words/page (although that last 'chapter' is fourteen pages long and composed of multiple scenes over an eventful couple of days; we'll count it as two, since I'm going to have to decide during the typing-up stage which of the many possible points I'm going to split it at). That makes another 24,000 words in eight chapters of approx. 3000 words, which is actually a pretty even balance, despite taking immeasurably longer to write!
However, I still have to cover plot point 9 (point 8 was Christine's escape, and I've already done that) before our two young protagonists are reunited, battered and bruised and very, very glad to see one another alive and well. And in Raoul's case, considerably more adult than when they parted ;-)
If I aim to polish off the fairly eventful plot point 9 in three thousand words or so, or at least not more than a couple of chapters, that will then balance out the two 'arcs' very neatly, even if one is almost entirely static and the other covers over a thousand miles :-p
Not that anyone other than me is going to be counting -- and it's more a matter of pacing than anything else. But it gives me a guideline.