I got lazy over Xmas and didn't blog, but you didn't miss much, since it wasn't a very remarkable holiday on my end.
We had a nice dinner party (white people style) at one of her coworker's homes on the 23rd, where there were about a dozen people, most of them neighbors and friends of the coworker. Good food, and interesting, since the coworker's husband is a hunter, and there's always wild game. We had a whole smoked pheasant, served cold with cheese and crackers as part of the appetizers, caribou ragu (like thick chili) over polenta, and a huge ham (store-bought, not wild boar shot) sliced up, along with salad, and more. Dinner was buffet style, with everyone serving themselves multiple times and sitting in the kitchen and dining room, casually. Dessert was a big Boston Creme Pie Malaya and I brought, and it wasn't bad either, despite basically being a twinkie with chocolate icing.
Malaya was off to a family party on the evening of the 24th, and then over to her parents' Xmas morning/afternoon, which left me plenty of free time to watch football and work on the novel. There was more of the latter than the former, fortunately, and as a result chapter 6 is finally complete, in all of its 79000 word glory. More on that in a bit.
Speaking of the 26th of December though, or Boxing Day as it's called in Canada and the UK, but not here in the US... there are supposed to be sales. Aren't there sales? I always hear on the radio and the teevee that there are "After Christmas" sales, and yet when we visited the very busy mall, and then Barnes and Noble, and then Mervyn's, then Marshall's, then Tuesday Morning, then TJ Maxx, etc, we didn't really see much evidence of that. Sure, the Xmas-themed wrapping paper and cards and such were all 50% off, and so were 2006 calendars, but that's a given.
Other stuff though, was not on sale, or at least not enough of a sale to matter. I was looking for some more sneakers (yes,
late term himbo-itus continues) and in Foot Locker, Champs, Finish Line, and Copeland's, it was the same story. (Well, not so much in Copeland's, where nothing ever seems to be on sale, and their prices are always 15% higher in the first place.) No sweeping sales on anything, just slightly reduced prices on individual items, all of them pretty clearly the stuff no one wanted in the first place. Shoes that have been not selling at $89 or $79 were down to $79 or $69. And still not selling.
We looked in a dozen stores at the mall and found nothing worth buying, other than a few calendars for delayed Xmas gifts, and if not for the gift certificates we'd received for Xmas (Malaya Barnes & Noble, me TJ Maxx), I don't know that either of us would have bought anything. I did pay real money for a shiny workout shirt and workout pants at Marshall's, but only because they were at their usual low price, and because I liked the styling of them both. I got some blue cargo pants and other stuff at TJ Maxx later, but that was just because I had a gift card for them. Same as the books Malaya got at B&N.
I know some of the sales go on early in the morning and were long over by the time we arrived in the late afternoon, but overall I was far from impressed. On the other hand, the mall was packed and the lines to buy stuff were far longer than usual in all of the stores we did enter, so maybe the merchants know what they're doing. Make a few superficial price reductions, take out some newspaper ads, and then hire extra cashiers and count your profits when the sheep flock to your store, and decide to buy stuff once they're there, even though the prices aren't very good.
As for the novel, as I said, I worked on it a lot over the last few days, and finally finished chapter 6. I should have had that one done back in early November, but I got delayed and distracted with week-long vacations over Halloween and Thanksgiving, and completely rewrote the 25k word battle scene several times during early/mid December. I'm finally satisfied with it though, for rough draft quality at least, and have passed the chapter over to Malaya to print out at work and read and comment on, when she has the time.
As for 7, I'm trying to be very diligent about the outline and the details, for once, so I (hopefully) won't get all bogged down in rewrites halfway through. And it's going well. I haven't actually begun writing the chapter yet, but I've got a sequential event outline that's very detailed and precise, and I've got a timeline worked out as well, but it's complicated. Lots of things happen in the same area in the same two week time frame.
It's not really complicated in terms of plot twists or the like (well, a little bit of that too) but mostly in terms of how I'm going to relate it. I'm not writing the novel in omniscent: it's all from the POV of several main characters, and they can't relate things for the reader's benefit unless they see them/know them personally. So I know what's going to happen and when and where and to whom, but I'm juggling how I'm going to relate it. Of the three narrators seen in the book (so far), all three are present in one place for the first time, and I'm probably going to have the one least involved in the events in that place narrate it, to give it an outside analysis, and also to keep it shorter and not be redundant to events that took place in chapter 6.
And no, I don't suppose any of that makes much sense to you guys at this point.
Overall, I'm again unsure how many chapters it will be; I'd been thinking that 7 would take the characters nearly to their objective, and then 8 would be them dealing with a challenge at that objective and moving on nearly to the finale, which would be in 9, before a short epilogue wrapped everything up. Now I'm thinking that if I divide it up that way, 7 will be like 70k words, 8 would be about 15k and all in one place, 9 would be another 15k, almost all of it the final battle/confrontation, and then the epilogue would be about 1500 words. I don't really like that chapter length breakdown though, so perhaps I'll end 7 earlier in the chronology and put the last half of third of it into 8, before 9 ends things up in relatively succinct fashion.
I'm not realy worried about the numbers, though. The whole chapter number system will almost certainly not survive into the final book form, and every chapter is broken up into 20 or 25 mini-chapters, and I could really do 7-9 as a single concluding chapter, since events in it are pretty contiguous.
Furthermore, I don't even need to say this if you've read many of my other updates on the book and my writing in general, but it's a pretty safe bet that this last stretch of material will turn out to be twice as long/detailed as I'm currently expecting, which will make all of this advance length planning superfluous. I just hope it won't take 3 or 4x as long to write, as a number of other chapters already have.
The whole "novel," right now, is somewhere around 3.7meg worth of .doc files, and that breaks down to something like 420,000 words. And I've got at least 80-100k more words to go; probably more like 150k. I'll be cutting out at least 150k of those just from chapter 2 on the rewrite, and maybe 30k from chapter 3 after that, but we're still looking at like 500k+ words, which would be well over 1000 pages even with very small print. Just going by size, (and pretending some publisher wouldn't force me to make grotesque edits and cuts) that's looking like 2 novels, and no, I can't see a convenient place to divide it in two. Not without major rewriting and reordering, at least. (Which might actually improve things, since the chapters 2-4 are largely build up for the much cooler stuff that comes later.)
In better news, I keep adding ideas (or saving old ideas that aren't going to fit into this one) for the planned sequel, which I think may well be a better and more interesting book, and should theoretically be a more managable size; I.E. one volume. And with any luck, an understanding publisher would think it a nice cap to a lovely trilogy.
