Okay, I’m going to talk…

Okay, I'm going to talk about something other than Aqua Erotica. Aren't you glad? :-) Do you guys remember "Challah"? It's one of the Sri Lankan cycle, and one that needed serious work. It was told in first person narrative, from three different points of view, and it just wasn't working in that form. Lots of telling, no showing. And it was a complex story, and tons of complexity was getting skimmed over in the process. So I knew I needed to revise it. Yesterday I spent four hour interspersing short third-person sections in among the first-person long bits. I got halfway through the story, and realized that while it was getting better, it wasn't getting better enough.

Today I've been making it mostly third-person narrative, showing in scene all these things that I'd just briefly told you about before. This is a hellish amount of work, but I'm kind of liking it. The problem, however, is that the story is growing to monster size. It was about 7000 words in the original form. After four hours today, I have translated 4000 words of that to 7600 words in the new form. If things went on at that rate, I'd have about a 10,000 word story -- long, but do-able.

But see, the first half of the original version was already a fair bit more detailed and developed than the rest of it. It takes a month, and the rest of the story takes almost a year. Now, I don't need to do something twelve times as long as what I already have, but I do need to add a fair bit more. All of which translates to this story probably ballooning out to something closer to 15K or 20K than 10K. Eep. I'm scared. Even if I don't think about how much work that's going to be (or all the deadline things I'm cheerfully ignoring to work on this), I'm afraid it's really going to throw off the balance of the collection to have one massively huge story near the end. Maybe the others will need to get longer. Maybe it's all growing out of control. Eep eep eep.

Today I'm just writing and trying not to think about it. Not succeeding too well, though. But at least the writing is going well...

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