Justicar Jhee and the Spectral Armada
A Justicar Jhee Mystery
A Justicar Jhee Mystery
I plan to take another pass at this one starting next week. It needs some external feedback, but it’s not in a state readable by anyone except me.
After I finished the denouement, I still needed five thousand more words to reach my Camp NaNoWriMo goal. I slotted the last remaining snippets into temporary locations. Proper integration and smoothing them out will wait until the next draft. The plot still resembles Swiss cheese, but now it’s in rough order.
Those last few K were rough. I didn’t have a snippet left to mine. I wrung everything I could from descriptions. Also, I beefed up anemic scenes with an added sentence here or a word there. Because I ran out of means to avoid it, I went back and tackled bits and pieces I’d delayed. I had truncated scenes to fix, missing scenes to invent. All of which I resisted, because they needed whos, whats, and hows I still don’t have good answers for. Most of what remained had to be new words, which is also why I procrastinated.
Out of the final 72K total, the story to notes ratio came out much better than the first draft. I wrote 66K story text and 6K notes. While some of the story text may be redundant overwriting, most of it came from filling plot holes. Approximately 5K of the notes came from the conceptual synopsis, so I could check the written scene against it. I avoided random musings about unresolved elements and characters (~1K) until the draft’s end. With only a few hundred words used for miscellaneous story notes, such as ‘where should this go’ or ‘missing scene or element: blah’. Compare that to the 1st draft which saw 20K out of 72K as notes.
This one keeps giving me ‘come hither’ glances, but I must resist for now.
Have a lovely day!