InsaneJournal

Progress...
I'm recovered from brain drain, and I had a somewhat productive day working on the second draft revisions for A Perfectly Empty Vessel. It's occurred to me that I need to add an extra day of time near the end of the story. This is to allow for several events to shape up with more detail, and there's some things that I want to do before the big fight, which will require at least that one full day.

For one thing, I'd feel more comfortable with the final gunfight if Wendy had spent at least a few hours at a range practicing with her new weapon. As I am big on reality, the one point that still stands out for me in the rough draft is how Wendy is comfortable with the shotgun she's using in spite of the fact that she hasn't had any practice.

In a lot of cases, Wendy has gotten around this before by being a "special case." She was trained to fire handguns and revolvers, and she HAD a near photgraphic memory. But her memory is shit, for reasons that I can't explain, and the new shotgun is a weapon that she has no background or proficiency with. So I'd like to see her take a belt of homemade shells out to a range to blast some paper targets before she gets to live targets.

I also need the extra day because Davis had dropped off a set of inorganic samples with a lab technician, and in the rough draft, there is no concluding scene to explain what the samples were. I supposed I could wait until the next book to uncover this, but I think it makes more sense to handle it earlier. Besides, this also gives me more of a chance to develop the budding friendship between Davis and lab technician Kira Nakamura.

There's some other character development issues to sort out, and there's an accuracy problem involving one of the daemon scenes near the end. But anywho, it is a rough draft, and after I'm done with the second draft, it can go back on the burner to cool while I look for test readers.

What I'll be looking for is whether or not this story stands on its own, and whether new readers just coming in feel lost or bored. Both of these are bad, m'kay?

And that's my main focus right now. I'm going to take tomorrow off from writing this to edit another chapter of Blood Relations, and to devote a bit more time to the beta reading project I've agreed to do. So far, I've not regretted offering to help, so you know it has to be a good story. ^_^

And with that update out of the way, I'm off to bed.

Later...