Wolf

Finished rereading/editing/rewriting Iron Wolf last night and I really do just love the energy of these novels. Starting Broken Katana, it is funny to see some things I just forgot the first time around. Some mismatching of information about wounds and things like that that I need to fix. Though those are so easy to fix that it’s mostly just a bit funny that there was this amount of sloppiness in the original.

But I also think that’s been part of this series from the start. It moves fast and breaks things and it’s not really about the sturdiness of the worldbuilding or anything like that but the feel of movement, the joy and glee in running and jumping over the edge without knowing what’s on the otherside.

This is something, though, that I want to address in this new and final version. Want to make all the fiddly bits lock into place and fit nicely. It will become more important as I launch into the final stretch where everything drives towards a conclusion and the end of their time in Avalon.

It’s also funny how long it takes until the reader really has a strong grasp of some of the ins and outs of the world. Since we’re following a couple of dummies who know nothing about the world, this is very fitting. The third novella does the handoff from one character to the next but I think the fourth one will potentially swap back and forth between them. Which is exciting.

The third also expanded our understanding of what’s going on, so the trick for the fourth will be to not expand much more, to keep things more or less as they are. Because we all only imperfectly understand our own world, it makes sense for people in a constructed world to not understand it perfectly.

Anyway, I’m having fun with it and I think that will spill out into the reader. My goal is to finish this novel by the end of February, which should be doable. Gives me about five weeks to get 30k words, which really isn’t very much. Of course, if the novel becomes 100k words, that’s a different problem! But I don’t anticipate such a thing.

Onward, onward, onward!

Oh, though I am also about to launch a secret project with Tony Tran, who illustrated Horus & Motherfucker and those Mork Borg poems I was writing last October.