Saturday, October 21, 2006
this post will be about the book. the book at this juncture means the first book i am writing, Baylen's Chain. I have an outline that takes me about 85% of the way through the book. it is split into four sections, with 12 chapters a section. each section is four years of Baylen's life, starting at age 12. so, i wrote the first chapter, and it is great. everything worked out well, all the points i wanted to get in there are in there, in fact i deleted some just because i wanted to save them for later. but now i am stalled on the second chapter. it has been almost three weeks since i have made meaningful progress. why is this you ask? well, about three weeks ago i went back to the outline to check some things. the first chapter takes place in one night, so time was not an issue. the rest of the first section needs to span four years, so there is a certain amount of time that needs to pass over the course of each chapter. i had it all planned out, so i thought. wrong. i had planned for three years. i don't know how i did it, but i blew it. at first, i tried to change the entire book to be three years a section, but then i realized it would screw up with the entire aging scheme i have, and ruined pretty much every important character arc. so i had to go back and add another year to the first section. i merged four chapters into two, and added two new chapters. one of those chapters is chapter two. i know what i want to put into it, it was already going to be a part of chapter two the first time. but it was only the beginning part. certain themes i was going to gloss over and let build a little later over time are now being started now. fortunately, it makes more sense to build them now. there are two main themes in particular that are going to take me through the rest of the book, pretty much the two constant background arcs (if you can call them arcs, they are more steady foundations Baylen's character is built upon). I am using his father to introduce them to Baylen, but the real individually practices Baylen creates for himself are the ones i have fleshed out, and those can only happen after his father dies at the end of section I. now i need to build the parts beneath everything. the things he has ingraved into his head that his entire life is built upon need to be introduced now, while his father is still here, and I need to find a way to create them without his noticing. they have to have been there since before the book started. they need to be commonplace, which means they need to be logical and simple so they can border against simple common sense. Baylen has to take them for granted, so he can rediscover them and expand on them in his own way and grow into an individual once he is alone. But now is the perfect time to set these things up. I have given myself what is basically a free chapter to build my characters and set them down a path that will lead them to the end. this chapter carries the two main themes the first chapter built, shows how they were built out of Baylen and his father's everyday life. This also directly sets up chapter three (the old chapter two) which takes that momentum from chapter one and starts the plot arc that will take us until the end of section I. i know the path, i just need to make sure i actually send them down that path at the beginning. I know what i want to happen in this chapter in basic terms, i just haven't had time to visualize it all like i want too. it is taking more time than i thought it would. It is frustrating, and that frustration is compounded by the fact that i have almost zero free time these days. it is a huge dilemma. how do i carry that momentum while showing the mundane moments of their lives? I need about a year off, that is really the only solution...
