Marks now at 64820

Marks of Repentance has been stalled on a difficult scene (gotta love that border guard dude) for over a week now. Yesterday afternoon Maripat brainstormed with me on how to fix that scene as she critted the novel for me last year. My brain has just gone around and around in circles trying to get to the meat of this scene and the importance of the guard.

As we chatted some things became clear--besides that the guard is way too full of himself. I'd missed a huge clue that ought to have derailed the entire plot right then and there. For the record, none of my critters caught it at the time either. So I've had to go back to page 43, page 91, etc, and change bits of backstory so that this border guard doesn't know some of the stuff I thought he knew. And then his partner had to come into larger play. She'd been basically a cipher-with-a-name in previous versions, but now she has an actual part. I've finally pushed the story 1300 more words to the good (I bet I've deleted that number, rewritten them, deleted them, rewritten them three times this week) and actually have a plan for the next writing session.

We're losing a fairly major character here, but that's okay because his thread kinda dwindled in the previous versions and this is more clear cut. And he'll be out there waiting for Book Two, along with the border guards.

I'm a happy camper and looking forward to the words flying by again next week. Yay!