A Far Sun: Update

As a follow-on to my post last month, I am making very good progress. The tendency to which I had eluded--that of being an inveterate story-teller and discovery writer--well, I am getting better at recognizing this in my writing, and catching myself before I've gone off on any really long tangents. This time around I detected no fewer than four sub-plots I was following (how does this happen? he asks), and while they are/were all interesting, they did not all get me closer to the end. As in: they weren't necessary to the plot.

Let me just say for the record, that I really, really want to finish this damn thing. I'm loving it, but I'm ready to put it down awhile and work on something else.

I unwrote two sub-plots and materially changed one other to set it up for a quicker ending. I also figured out I had three sub-plots all converging on a single point, so that enabled me to keep the really interesting one involving the native girl who gets hurt, because I knew it was ending. No, she doesn't die.

Her story is being used to show the larger cultural conflict in microcosm; I think it fits perfectly. This story is being told at human level. No grand, sweeping movements of hundreds, just the good (or bad) intentions and flawed actions of human beings trying to do what they think is best.

In all I cut about 8K words, setting my new total about 80K for "book 2," after having cleaved off "book 1" after 118K words. So, that puts my grand total about 198K. I am counting, since I really don't want this second volume to go over 120K. I still think I can do it.

On a final note: I know why I got off track and wrote more than needed. In this part of the story my heroes are at "the Library" where the remaining "pale-skins" live, along with a larger number of natives (I call them "sun-skins"). While sun-skin life is interesting in its own way, it's not nearly as intriguing as all the politics and competing agendas in place at the Library. It's too easy to get off-track chasing down everyone's story, which is exactly what I'd done. There may be a thousand stories to tell, but only a few will get me to the end. That's my story, and I'm sticking with it.

Until it's done, anyway.