I give up on word counters.  After a good amount of progress, I had First Reader review, and I reviewed, and via her notes and my own sinking feelings, I realized the story had gone off the rails and was heading for a ditch.  Not a total loss — lots of good bits and pieces I can salvage — but the framework was just wrong, a relic of a prior draft of the story that didn’t reflect enough of the changes made in part one.  I’ve restarted and have New Chapter One almost done, and it’s very different and that sort of zingy, tingly right you get when you sing the perfect note.   It, too, will be revised and reviewed and tweaked and judged, but I know I’m on the right path now and, though that kills prior word-count, I also don’t care. 

‘Cause now I’m really excited about where this is going.

And we’re back to the word-counting!  Tweakage took longer than planned.  Also, I blame Inda by Sherwood Smith.  Damn wonderful, completely engrossing, life-taking-over book.

Doing a bit of tweaking before moving on with SanClare Scarlet.  Once the tweaks are done, I’m thinking I’ll go back to La Cause and focus on getting some serious wordage done on it “for reals.”  In the meantime, I think the weather’s getting to me — I like it cool but it keeps vacillating between autumnal and dog-day and it’s wearing me down.

No “progress” tonight, but I did write 1,200 words on the backstory of La Cause.  I looked up more pictures of aforementioned Inspirational Model Girl, and, while none of the rest of them struck me as Sophie-esque, I do think those few from the magazine were enough to help me move closer to knowing who she is.  I ripped those pages out to refer to later.  I need to buy a tack-board or something for my office so I don’t have a pile random papers cluttering up the desk.

I’ve been dabbling around trying to figure out the way magic works in this world.  It needs to be very structured and organized and almost academic, but there are also hidden, much wilder strains out there.   I think I may have it figured out after tonight. 

I also found a great site with detailed, fin-de-siecle maps of Europe.  I am now trying to come up with alt-names for my violently reworked Europe.  Some things won’t change much (France); some things won’t change much, but will have very different names (Great Britain, for backstory reasons I may never spell out in the story); and I may just make some things up entirely.  All the good alt-London names seem to be taken…  This will be an Edwardian-flavored Europe still very much riddled with principalities and kingdoms randomly sprinkled all around the behemoth nations.  It is also a world teetering on the precipice of violent change–some of it good but much of it Very Bad and To Be Avoided If At All Possible.

Ye Agent asked a couple of questions on his blog about process.  Here they are with my answers:

What is your favorite part of the writing process?
I don’t have a favorite part. I like pretty much every part of the process. After about the zillioneth round of editing the same thing, I can get pretty sick of it, but otherwise, I do like it all.

What do you do when you know you’ve done something wrong and haven’t yet figured out what the source of that wrongness is?
That depends on the work in progress. If it’s something I’m steeped in (such as the SanClare books), I almost never get that stuck. I go back and reread, and the bit that’s gumming up the flow usually reveals itself. With a newer piece (such as La Cause Sociériste), I generally go back to the plotting and look for the problem there. If I get really hung up (short stories — not my forte), I hand it to my First Readers to diagnose.

What would your answers be?

Back to SanClare Scarlet tonight.  My leapfrog plotting on La Cause is still being mentally revised.  I need to nail down the ending which is vaguely defined at the moment, and I need to sort out which of several candidates will win the fight for Central Plot.  I did find a picture in a magazine this weekend that the moment I saw it, I thought, “That’s Sophie-Katrine!”  And the looks of this model led me to figure out more about Sophie’s mysterious (but not dead and in-the-story somewhat) mother which is helping frame the whole backstory in a new and fun way. 

In the meantime, conflict enters the father/son-esque relationship of two of the main characters in SanClare Scarlet.  People aren’t speaking to each other.  Someone is justifiably angry about secrets kept from him.  And they haven’t even reached the capital yet!

In spite of the incredible tennis tonight (Venus! Jelena! Roger! Andy!), I still managed to get a bit of wordage in.  That’s Chapter One all done.

Not a bad night’s work, considering I’ve neglected this story for so long.  I was letting it simmer on my mental backburner.  I know the main character of SanClare Scarlet so well, it’s easy to write him.  Sophie is someone I’m still getting to know, which makes the going a bit slower.  I like her, though.  I wrote a scene tonight where I think I found out a key thing about her.  Here’s the pivotal snippet:

When she’d finally climbed into bed sometime later, left alone by her maid and Polly and faced with her own thoughts, she had to dig her nails into her palms to keep the tears at bay. All she wanted was to fix things, but she’d already made so many mistakes. She wished more than anything that she had John’s courage and Polly’s gumption, but she was only Sophie. And that had never yet been good enough.

Tonight went much better than the whole entire weekend has gone, wordage-wise.  I’ve been off and feeling overtired and distracted, but after Walker Bros. French Toast Therapy for dinner, I think everything’s going to be all right ;)