A Far Sun: update

Word count: ~113,400
Pages: ~448

I'm three scenes into act III. I've introduced the Head Librarian, but not named him. My heroes have just crested the hill and like Dorothy looking through her open doorway, they suddenly see the Library before them. And the contrast is just about as obvious, too. In a destroyed and decaying world, the Library is an outpost of activity and order--a relative civilization.

But of course there's something wrong in paradise.

My progress is slower than I'd initially hoped. I understand it now, because I'm having to make sure everything I've said up to this point (everything that's happened and everything my characters have said) is consistent with what's now unfolding. I had to change three small scenes and identified some other changes I'd like to make, but can wait.

In case anyone wonders, this is why I like to write my stories serially--in the order things happen. Even though I know what's going to happen at the macro level, there are a million details (some quite significant) I cannot know until I've written them. Sure, I could write scenes in any order because arguably the rewriting I do (to scenes that happened earlier) isn't less than the rewriting I'd have to do (to later scenes, previously written) if I wrote things out of order, I just prefer to work this way. But now I'm to the good part, and things are gonna pick up speed. The first bunch of pages in act III are expositional (because of introducing a bunch of new characters and in some ways--a whole new world), but pretty soon things are going to get interesting.

Last night I worked through a bunch of stuff in talking with my wife during (and after) dinner. It's that left-brain--right-brain thing. I have a couple important details about the Head Librarian I need to work out, and one or two about another key character, but all in all the story is coming together nicely.

I suffer some anxiety because my "action-adventure" story has a lot of "character stuff" in it. For me the most interesting part of the writing is the characters and their relationships to (and with) each other. So I'm writing what I want, and my story is about what I want it to be about. There may be some larger things going on, but I'm telling this story from ground-level--from the human level. I am aware not everyone will want to read it, but it's still very interesting to me, so I forge ahead.