Justicar Jhee and the Spectral Armada
A Justicar Jhee Mystery
A Justicar Jhee Mystery
It’s all part of my rock and roll fantasy mystery series.
The struggle to fix the order of these ~50K words feels somewhere between Sisyphean and Herculean. One which functionally stopped editing in its tracks until I could take a breath and think it through. The drain has been on par with another WIP which, while more than four times the size, was in rough linear order.
My next stop is going to be a mega-scene edit. Not a mega edit of scenes, but the edit of one mega long scene. A mega-scene for my purposes is a single scene, usually a key or pivotal one, whose size ballooned up to or three times the size the average (that) of my normal ones.
Because it’s a key scene, my subconscious worked on it either way before or way after I wrote it, often in fragments. Snippets of dialogue. Better staging. Rephrasing of reveals. As a result, the scene became huge, disjointed, and jumbled. A lot of it is often redundant. It’s similar to what happened to the whole draft on a larger scale when I wrote non-linearly. When the scene bits came to me, if I tried to integrate them properly then and there, my writing stalled or slowed to a crawl. Usually, I wound up adding it ‘as is’ even if redundant so I could move on and come back to it later.
This is later. I have to decide to merge or discard pieces. Likely, I will rewrite it after noting what key points I want to salvage, if any.
Random excerpt:
Jhee descended steps. She ascended steps. She turned this way then that down corridors. In a long hallway of alcoves and columns, she paused to consult the map.
I repeat: Yeah, right.
Excerpt:
The pockets were precisely where Jhee liked them. “I believe we can do that. I’m very interested in seeing what sort of facilities they have. It’ll give me a better idea of what sort of donation to give.”
I’ve had enough you buddy. Now go cool off while I deal with your pals.
Have a lovely day!