Anyway, I think I'm just going to dive into "Lakshmi's Diary" (the story of her mother). I still have fond hopes of finishing this revision before lunch, so I can actually work on SH stuff this afternoon. Heh. We'll just see about that...
Finished the revision of…
Finished the revision of "Bodies in Motion" and sent it out. If you're going to read it, please read it before reading the rest of this paragraph, as spoilers abound. I'm relatively happy with this stage of it; it doesn't really feel done yet, though. Specifically, I still need to infuse more of Chaya's work throughout (which will happen after I read that book), and I'm not sure I'm happy with how the conflict reads in the last few sections. There's a particular character movement through the story, a rather slow and subtle one, in which she goes from being a very reactive, passive person to someone who just builds up tension until she explodes...and I think it's plausible as it goes, but I'm not certain. Part of the problem is that the tension is building up around a somewhat ambiguous and perhaps illusory event; I'm not sure if that'll bother readers. I'm also concerned that they read the romantic relationship correctly -- it's actually intended to be a fairly shallow, if intense one (ref. Jordan, for those who keep track of my love life :-), but I'm not sure if that comes across. I wanted it to be the kind of relationship that she could feel intensely about, but which wouldn't, in that end, be all that significant to her. It's kind of hard to get that across; I think we're really programmed in this culture to try to take romantic relationships and shove them into the 'happily-ever-after' model. I'm also concerned that if people do understand how she fools herself for a while (thinking she loves him more than she does, thinking he's betrayed her more than he has), that they won't like her as much. *I* like her -- other people should too. :-) She may be foolish and misguided, but she's climbing out of a deep, dark hole. It's a slow kind of thing...