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Thursday, January 10, 2013

No loose ends and minding the details

I just updated the progress meter in the sidebar to reflect my current word count of 94,172.  I was thinking that my rough draft of Book 3 would be just shy of the initial goal of 100k (kind of like the rough draft of Pandora's Box was just shy of the initial goal of 80k), but now I'm thinking it will be a little over.  How much over I don't know -- I think I have 6k to go until the end, easily, but then I also have to go back and fill in a chapter that I missed earlier on.


I'd thought I was closer to the end because I forgot how many loose ends I had to tie up.  I had some things going on with minor characters throughout the book that I needed to resolve, even though they didn't play major parts in the story.  Luckily that problem is easy enough to fix -- I just needed a couple of extra scenes before I put the ending on the book.

One of the nice things about it being a series is that I don't have to tie it up in too neat a bow, because you will see all the characters again.  All of their stories will be continued in the next installment, so I don't have to give them a happily-ever-after or anything like that.  However, I do have to resolve it enough so that readers don't say, "But wait!  So-and-so was in the hospital -- what happened with that?"

Details are important.  Once I tie up the end of this novel, I have to go back through the first novel and figure out the timeline so that I can finish rewriting and revisions.  Since I'm writing an alternate history -- the mob controlled by vampires instead of by Capone and other (human) gangsters -- I want to insert references to more real historical events into the novel, and to place them I need to figure out the exact timeline of the first novel -- when things are happening, and how much time is passing.  I tend not to think about those picky details while I'm writing, but now that the material is written, I need to do some fine-tuning and figure it out.

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