I’ve been struggling lately to add some needed information to clarify the plot without messing up the flow of existing dialogue. It’s hard. Today I had a mini breakthrough, so I thought I’d record it for posterity.

Instead of trying to shoehorn the information into the scene, go back to a previous point and have someone ask a question that sparks thoughts about it. Now when it gets brought up in the place where it needs to come out it doesn’t feel like it’s coming out of nowhere. Also, if the scene needs to start earlier, now there is a reason for those people to seek each other out to talk about it.

So that’s my revelation for the day. It’s free. You get what you pay for.

Writing accomplishments: Stumbled across the technique above in my attempts to add clarity to ALL ROCS (C2). I didn’t have time to get much done, but at least I feel like I’m able to start chipping away at it.

Writing progress: More edits on ALL ROCS (C2). I’m down to 15 notes and almost all of them are related to a part of the plot that was very fuzzy when I was writing the first draft. There’s probably a lesson to be learned here.

Favorite note of the day: “Need to get info about F. or something related to the plot here.” Oh right. The plot. It would be good if the plot was involved.

I am about to give up and contact WordPress support about blog comments. I have it set to send me mail whenever there is a comment and to approve any comment from someone previously approved. It is doing neither of those. These seem like such basic things that I can’t imagine it would just be broken, and yet…

Citizen-related activities: Filled in my state primaries ballot so it is ready to be dropped off at my polling place on Tuesday morning. Of the 30 or so people running for governor, a significant number of them appear to be clinically insane. I guess it makes sense — delusional people need to spread their information and they’re all going to pick the race with the most prestige and power. But… wow.

Writing accomplishments: Worked on notes from ALL ROCS (C2) — I’ve gotten through about half of them now. I think the dreaded chapter five is almost where I want it to be. Now I just need to address all the places where information needs to be revealed and hasn’t been. Also did a quick read on the first few chapters of C3. One of the gremlins accidentally changed names in between books two and three, so I corrected that.

I’ve also started thinking about whether I want to do something for Camp NaNo in July. I’m somewhat tempted to work on something new, preferably something light and humorous. Hm…

June is here which means it must be time to revisit my goals.

From May:

• Go live with the website. (This is the “make a list” item of this list.)
• Get the final two chapters of ALL ROCS BRIGHT AND BEAUTIFUL (working title of Curtains 2) out to Yolo Writer’s Cramp for critique.
• Fix the ending of ALL GREMLINS GREAT AND SMALL (Curtains 1). I think I know what to do now — I just need to sit my butt in the chair and do it.
• Make another pass through the query for ALL GREMLINS GREAT AND SMALL.

I completed the first two, made progress on the third and didn’t address the last one. BUT I ended up adding a new high priority item near the end of the month, so I’m feeling pretty good about my progress. Still, that query needs to get done.

Anyhow, here are the new goals for June:

• Address all the notes from the read-through on ALL ROCS (C2) and get it out to the WordForge novel group.
• Fix the ending of ALL GREMLINS GREAT AND SMALL (Curtains 1). (Carried over from May)
• Send out the query for ALL GREMLINS GREAT AND SMALL for proofreading. (This just means I have to get it in as close to final form as I can so someone else can do a quick check for typos.)
• Revise and submit the first couple chapters of C3 (which does not yet have a name) to YWC.

The first one is going to be the hardest since I need to finish in the next week, but at least that will keep me from procrastinating too much.

Writing accomplished: Finished the read-through + brief notes for ALL ROCS (C2). (And there was much rejoicing.) There are about fifty notes I need to address which is… a lot. Especially since some of them say things like “improve this” and “probably should address this at some point”. Still, at least that pass is finished.

Day-job: Spent the afternoon trying to figure out why my new website looked fine in Chrome but always had a collapsed navigation bar in IE and Firefox. Finally dropped back to an earlier version of bootstrap and everything magically worked on all the browsers. I’m so glad that writing cross-platform code is so seamless these days…