Or maybe not

Possibly I was wrong about the source of slowness, at least in part.

The last two or three, rather long, scenes have been in Gwyn's point of view. Writing them was like pulling teeth with a pair of toothpicks. The one I've been working on today is from Jenn's point of view, and it's more like "Hey wait for me, I can't write that quick."

Now, Gwyn is a private sort of person. He doesn't like to give out his thoughts on things. With some coaxing, he'll tell me what he's doing, but his emotional state and observations have to be dragged out, word by word. He's happy enough when saying what other people are doing, where he can fade into the backgroudn and become an "invisible narrator" (grumbles) but once the focus of action turns to him, he doesn't want to be part of it.

On the other hand, Jenn wants to be the center of attention and he's also happy to share his observations on things. If he had his way, he'd spend the whole novel sitting on the edge of the river watching the world go by and tell me about it.


It's not the first time I've noticed different in how my POV characters share information. I've had some who only notice what immediately effects them, and others who have to look at everything and anything and comment on it. It's a strange phenomomen. I have to work out how to use it to my advantage.

Slow

Progress has slowed down significantly since the halfway point (I still have to do all this again: nooooooooo). This is not helped by me wanting to redo a large part of this second half -- mainly J's motivation. What's at stake is he fails in the end game? He'll get arrested and, hang on, haven't we just had this? So stakes need to be upped and the attraction of succeeding as well.

Then there's the new idea, which be November's New Novel, but it is so very hard to focus on reworking an old story when there's a fresh new one trying to get attention :\