Two chapters

Working on chapters 30 *and* 31 of Arctic Raoul in tandem, since I wasn't at all happy with the divide between them. I realised a bit belatedly that part of the problem was that I'd done precisely what I had recently been condemning in other work, which was to switch perspectives from one half of a couple to the other half and then self-indulgently hash over the events that had just happened all over again from the other person's perspective :-( At least having identified the problem it was easier to fix it; I now understand the temptation to do this a bit better!

I cut a chunk of rehash from the start of Raoul's chapter (we shall now be in Raoul's point of view basically for the rest of the story), along with over-complex explanations about roads and so on, and that improved it a lot. I cut some of the waffle from Christine's chapter about searching and failing to find anything; conversely I rewrote the 'action scene' quite a lot, to make it slightly longer and I hope more effective. I think the balance of the two chapters is a lot better now -- finally!

And the good news is that on reading ahead -- and I wanted to read ahead, which is always a good sign -- I thought the following chapter, the infamous Plot Point Fifteen that I was struggling with all of four years ago [bigeek], worked well in its eventual revised version... so I shouldn't, mercifully, have to do too much more editing on that.

The bad news is that I am now up to 114,000 words or so, and still with multiple chapters to go before the end of the story...