I started feeling like I…

I started feeling like I wasn't doing anything other than working on these revisions. It was making me feel...umm...unsettled, somehow. And the house was getting scarier and scarier. So last night, I went out and spent an hour happily shopping for groceries for Saturday's shindig. And this morning, I put a load of laundry in, took out trash, cleared up stuff that was just piling up around. I feel better. In a bit, I'll load up the dishwasher (now that I've bought detergent, I can do that), and clean the sink. Oh, it'll be nice to have a clean sink. And a little later, I'll make some cornbread with chilies and whole corn, that I'll use in a few days to make a double batch of that nummy sausage-chipotle stuffing. Mmmm... Just thinking about it makes me feel more sane, and more willing to go back to work on the revisions. I didn't quite finish the Peter revisions yesterday, despite many hours of work, but I think it shouldn't take too long to finish them off today. Then I'll try to clean up the sex club line, I think, which will require some more actual thinking, because there's a logic break in one of the branches. I'm sure I'll figure out how to fix it, though.

I was talking to Duncan about this project yesterday, about whether they'll do more in the future. That's the plan. And I pointed out that in fact, it's been surprisingly hard to do this reasonably well. There's a lot to keep track of, and if you don't want it to be purely formulaic, you need to keep changing things subtly. Let your protagonist make a choice, but then have the choice lead her to places she didn't quite expect (just like the real world does). One of the most interesting things is that each major fork actually changes the character of your protagonist, so that both her and her world are subtly changed from that point forward. If you compare all the endings, the protagonist in each of them really ought to be recognizably different -- sometimes, they wouldn't even like each other. That's been a lot of fun to play with, and has made the project really interesting overall, but it's also surprisingly difficult to do well. I think there are plenty of good writers who write lovely and/or hot erotica who just wouldn't be suited to such an intellectual sort of writing project. Funny, for what will end up a rather fluffy book. :-)

It does look like there will be one more round of line edits after I finish these structural revisions, so those of you on my readers' list can expect to get an RTF copy of the whole damn thing next Monday or so, and I would *love* line edits from those of you who have time. Especially for consistency issues; what with all the revisions, it's tricky keeping track of exactly what each Kathryn knows at any given point, or what's happened to her, for example.