March 15, 2009
I did not finish Part Two. I drew right up to the end, the final scene, a very important climax, and suddenly it seemed that everything fell apart. The scene was just not working. Knowing what should happen, none of the characters were in the right place for it play out in the way it needed to. I was not feeling it. There was no movement and no power. I was stuck.
What I did was leave Chapter 27 incomplete and move on to the Interlude (“The Quest of the Fire Heart”), most of which is unchanged from the earlier draft. That was a good distraction, and I always liked that story. (In fact, “The Quest” was something that I had in mind for a very long time before I ever wrote it. I finally composed what is the frame of the current version in the spring of 2005 and revised it several times until bringing it into Gathering Thunderheads last year. The restructuring I talked about before has given the story more of a place in the context of the novel, as before it did seem to leap out of nowhere. That interlude is complete, so now I must embark on Part Three.
However, I think I will go back and do a heavy revision to Part Two, trying to build it up and come again to the climax and see if this time I can bring all the threads together. It desperately needs revision. I think I will spend this week on that endeavor.
Filed under The Redemption Saga.
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