Slightly better on the Manda

This is going to be a rambling update. You Have Been Warned :p

Things are going slightly better with the "When the Mute Speak", my current WIP (YA Fantasy). For one, I figured out how to fix my start off without rewriting the entire thing. Always handy - because the beginning of the book supports the rest of it, and it has to be right. Getting it right is incredibly hard, and I may have managed to get halfway there. Good news is that I think I can get past "halfway there" without rewriting the entire thing.

Chapter two is a problem. Info dumps galore, and it doesn't feel... real. But I can do chapter two better. I figured it out. We're getting there.

My Beta's are awesome, as usual, and the second one is crazy fast. So things are going well.

A lesson I have learned when it comes to Beta's: always give out the same version. Get more than one perspective. Then re-write.

There is still the problem of my second act. My beta is getting confused at the climax, which is never good, so I need to set that up better. I also need to show the process that Kira goes through in coming to her conclusions. I never noticed before, but she often tends to make them on the spot, and with no evidence to back them up. I can see how she came up with it, but then I wrote the plot, so it's probably me taking shortcuts.

In other news, I'm going to start a new project for Nanowrimo. Hopefully it'll give me the break I need from Kira and her world, and get me into editing mode. Personally, I'm excited about the community aspect of Nanowrimo. I've never actually met proper (I mean people who are writing for publication) writers. I wonder what it'll be like?

The desicion on the which of the next two ideas to follow through on is a tricky one. Both require research, one requires damn good writing. (The other requires good writing, but only as a vechial of plot. The writing in NKFH has to be brilliant.)

The other one (no working title yet) requires research on the police. NHFH requires more life lived - I don't have the experience to do it justice. So it's probably going to be the other one first.

How do I find out about the police and their internal structure? A question for a rainy day.

Update completed. I wish you all a good weekend.

Sian~

No Knack for Happiness

Well, Book Three is no longer book three anymore. I even know what the ending might be like. Not the scene or anything, but defiantly the feel. Been quite a weekend for things coming together. I had a quick look over the first six chapters of The Manda, and came to the realisation that I may not be finished line-editing wise, but I am sick to death of looking at it. I don't think the prose is terrible by any means. Is it the best it could be? Probably not, but because my idea of what is good prose and what is not is influenced by whether I yawn or not, all I know is that it holds my interest.
Also, it's a fantasy book, for crying out loud. Not a literary one either. I might as well make sure the bloody thing is readable, and then give it to other people to read. They will have different perspectives and tell me if it's shit or not.
Five times I've rewritten that thing, four times from scratch. There are still three chapters, I think, that need fixing. I came up with a solution to a major plot problem, where the character gets on a ship because the plot needs her too, not for any other reason.
Now I have her stowing away, being found by the man who in the original draft took her in because it was implied that he recognised the same terrible things from his life, in hers. What a load of crock.
Anyway, after she's found, he needs a messenger and filer, so he uses her.
Why that took me five drafts to think of, I have no idea.
So, the Book Three, the one that is going to need a hell of a lot of research, now has a name. No Knack for Happiness. Got a nice ring to it I think.
I've also realised something strange. The books that I'm writing (at the moment, The Manda and Varrick) and the books I'm planning (No Knack for Happiness and a thrillery thing) follow a strange pattern.
The Manda was the book I wanted to read. Varrick is also I book I enjoy reading and writing, but I imagine it being the book my father would give me after he'd read it.
No Knack for Happiness is not something my father would ever read, but my mother defiantly would. Then the thriller (it does actually have more plot in my head then "No Knack for Happiness" at the moment. I didn’t say: oh, thriller is the next genre I should try out. I just think "No Knack for Happiness" will be harder to write for me, so it's coming first, before I go to Med school, while I still have time on my hands）
The thriller is something I hope my brother would like.
So, I have subconsciously been working my way through my family in the ideas that materialise and take form in my head. I enjoy all the things and idea I have, but each one is slanted slightly more to one family member than another.
Uncanny, huh. Well. The next thing I get to do is make up spaceships. I'm writing the Varrick book so fast that I'm trying to describe things that are not only imaginary, but I have no idea what they look like.
Amazing fun. Bloody hard work.