Onward and Upward!

Onward and Upward!, originally uploaded by Jaquandor.

I haven’t updated my progress on Princesses In SPACE!!! (not the actual title) in a while, so here’s where things stand. In the two months since my last word count update here, I’ve produced an additional 21,000 words, which is a nice total. That’s a bit off the pace of 500 words a day that I’ve been trying to maintain, but there were extenuating circumstances. (Sigh…aren’t there always?)

First, of course, the last update came a couple weeks before Thanksgiving, so I had to get through the Holiday season, with all its distractions and demands on time, which all conspired to produce more days where I didn’t produce a single word than I would have liked.

More demanding, however, was my realization a few weeks back that I needed to do some backtracking. I don’t like to backtrack or edit as I go; it’s my firm belief that “This way, madness lies”. I’m the kind of person who can get totally bogged down in my own editing, and I could lose myself in trying to make fifty or a hundred pages totally perfect in favor of getting the story told. And even with this bit of revision work, I really had to discipline myself to not get sucked into too much sentence-fixing.

So why the revision? As I noted at the time, I came to realize that a part of my backstory wasn’t as solid as it could have been, which meant that there were times when certain characters’ actions felt forced and contrived instead of something a person might actually do in that particular circumstance. So I had to suspend “forward progress” and retreat a bit into the narrative, doing some fixing work and strengthening some things and removing others.

Now, there are things that I know will have to be changed when I go back and do the real editing, and in most cases I just make a notation in a file I helpfully call “Notations for editing”, to which I will refer when I go back to fix things. In a lot of cases I can just set the changes in my mind and write from a certain point as if the changes are in effect. But this time, the changes were too involved to do that. I had to backtrack.

And now I’m done backtracking, with the helpful side effect that this work has helped the rest of the story crystallize in my brain a bit. That’s a very welcome development!

So at this point, I’m just about ready to start the final third of the book. Allegiances are revealed! Traitors are unmasked! Loves are declared! Spaceships are flown! Princesses are rescued and do some rescuing! And the Universe will never be the same! Until next time…Excelsior!!!

(So, how was my Stan Lee impersonation?)

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