A thought for Amy on her last review of =The Lunar Contract=:
It's written with a first-person narrator, which makes it easy to put the description in. The narrator, who is part of the story, wants us to see those things. It's harder in third-person, especially if you don't want the narrator addressing the reader directly or offerring reflections (as mine did in the hole-in-one story).
And hey, I can't keep you from working on a private copy, but I'd much rather have you working on your story.
I'm getting just a couple hundred words done at a sitting because I'm treading carefully, wearing spiked boots as I walk across sacred cows.
'Shopworn' applies. Read some of Ed Hoch's mysteries. He wrote over 950, each one a honey. I like the Simon Ark collections best, but you can't go wrong with any of them.
The best ideas come while driving. For your situation ... maybe it will help to learn shorthand. If you can write 130 wpm, you might find time to jot it down ... and nobody else will know what you wrote.
They're a team and they've done this before. Pfennidz wants it done his way.
Trying to think how paint Pausonallie's knowing-without-understanding. I also have to strip the scenes down a bit.
Still working on how characters will link the skipped chapter and the nrxt sequence for Merran and Company.
Not gone, then. Lost.
Wonderful review! Congratulations. It was an honor to watch the story develop.
Day
Skip that four PM conference and go early.
But I have to think about which characters, and what effect on alignments. Mmm. I may just revise the ending of that chaper first.
I have a new idea on how to get Pausonallie and Merran out of the porn-spell theater.
You're not going back to Plantagenet then?
Northumberland could be Northumbria.
One of Margery Allingham's stories takes place in the fictional Pontisbright Castle.
hautbois
You could also say that their fates were entwined before they were born ... and add something about ways they could never have imagined. That gives away everything and nothing.
The dragons and the girls are both marked for extinction, and they will discover their fates bound?
Flash fiction
Der gabelschwanz Tuefel
On filling in detail:
In the movie 42, Branch Rickey is trying to get Jackie Robinson to the Major League Brooklyn Dodgers. His field manager, Leo Durocher, is skeptical, even hostile, but stands by his boss when it hurts. Then Durocher is suspended for a year over a scandal, and Rickey has to find a new manager. He taps a retired manager (whose name I forget). That manager says "I promised my wife I would never put another uniform on." Rickey counters "You don't have to wear a uniform. Manage in a suit like Connie Mack did."
Leaving aside why Connie Mack wore a suit in the dugout, this fellow's argument with his wife would have been red meat to any screenwriter. But we never see it. Why? Because it's not part of the story.
Leo Durocher did not manage during Jackie Robinson's rookie season, and that's a detail that deserves to be filled. But it was filled quickly, in four short scenes: Durocher misbehaving, Commissioner Happy Chandler delivering the bad news, a very abbreviated scene with Rickey and Durocher, and the discussion with Durocher's replacement. I doubt it was five minutes of screen time.
Jube, you and I err on opposite sides of the side story. I am stingy with description in order to keep the focus clear. (I fail in that goal in other ways.) You include so much detail that description grows runners and sets down side-story roots.
I'm thinking now of two of John Dickson Carr's Henri Bencolin novels and their perorations. In The Corpse in the Waxworks the climax occurs by a telephone call. In The Four False Weapons (IIRC) there is a scene in a private casino. Both are full of tension; both come alive. I have to go back and see how the description is handled. The Sleeping Sphinx is another of Carr's stories to revisit. It feels description-heavy. Whether it is or not is another matter. (It is also, IMO, one of the best detective novels ever written. Opinions differ on the matter.)
Reception room, banquet hall, conference room(s).
I would say not.
Congratulations indeed!
