Jotted down a couple of rough poem ideas, and updated the Paltry Sums story⎼again⎼to read over⎼again⎼before sending it out.
Then spent a little time reworking a different novella, the one I workshopped last year. I don’t normally jump between two larger projects but I had an idea about how to fix one of the issues that came up in the workshop so I did that. I’ll read the novella over quickly this week to see if the changes flow. The fix was to rip out three scenes and a whole thread, plus a few characters. What was removed might make for a separate story set in the same world, but I don’t think it belongs in this story.
Somehow, I switched gears and returned to the current novella. I plotted the major scenes I know so far and then completed a full MACE exercise on all the arcs for book one. The exercise is really helpful. The main character arcs and two of the world plot arcs are spread across the three books. But book one has two plot arcs and two plot threads that end in book one. Getting those arcs resolved satisfactorily in the right order is critical for a satisfying ending of book one and not leaving any significant cliff-hangers. There’s a lot of character death at the end of book one, but it’s nothing like what GRMM does.
Kevin J. Fellows 