Still working on chapter eight, or whichever one it is. This may take a while. I hadn't given this one a whole lot of thought, because plotwise it's a quiet moment before the storm. Just people standing or sitting around talking. But now, whoa. There's a lot to do here. Digging into Character 4 got me off to a good start, and now I see that in the middle of his coming in, I need to stop and do some digging into Character 3, and rethink her in more depth. I'm very big on finding emotional "moments" in scenes and playing to those, and somehow I completely, utterly missed a huge one: betrayal. The story is about multiple betrayals and this is the first one, and I just blipped over it, trying to think how to bring in information and backstory and generally worrying over other aspects of the ms.

So I'm working on Character 3 in the middle of working on Character 4, in the middle of this very short bit of meeting and dialog. If the bit were in real life, it would probably last maybe a minute or two at most, but I can see that I'm going to have to put a lot of time and elbow grease in to get it working. I'm overwriting like crazy right now, and I know that most of what I'm doing will have to be cut. But it's got to be done so that I can figure out what I do and don't need.

It's discouraging to think that all this work will mean exactly nothing to anybody else. If I do it properly, the work won't show. And of course there's the whole issue of whether the ms will ever make it to publication and the added fillip that even if it does it's unlikely to be read in a market that puts out 10,000 new books a year, not to mention that the few souls who do manage to take a gander will just blip over it on their way to the other 9,999 books.

So in order not to be discouraged, I just won't think about all that.

Back to work.