Taking advantage of a brief respite while I wait for w-f-h notes to come. Opened my swordfighting WIP for the first time in I-don't-know-how-long, and picked up where I left off. It doesn't look so bad, after being away from it for a while. There is obviously a lot of info I'm trying to cram in, and it's obvious when I am not doing it well. But with the benefit of a little distance, this looks like it's just going to require patient trial and error as far as getting everything in the right place and at the right pace. What I have doesn't seem to be particularly awful or unworkable. It seems interesting and fun, at heart--it's just that I will have to keep on and on and on until all the pieces are properly ordered and then streamlined.

At this moment--with benefit of distance--this ms looks like hard work that will eventually pay off. But when I say hard work, I mean a lot of hard work. Most of my time will be spent writing things the wrong way, then cutting and moving and trimming to fit...then seeing that that doesn't work, either. And so on and so on, again and again and again. The most difficult part will be not to get discouraged, to take all the wrongness in stride and remember that it will all come around in the end. Although I can definitely see that the end is not going to get here for a long time.

One thing that makes me feel a little better is that I almost always feel, when reading other people's mss, that you can hook me in chapter one, but you'd better start grounding things in chapter two. It usually feels wrong if the story isn't getting pinned down a little situation and problem-wise by then. Hooks are not enough anymore. I need info, I need a bigger picture of what's happening. I need at least a little context to chew on.

And that's what's going on here. This is chapter two. It's the right place to start providing context and info. There's just so much context and info, it'll take me a while to pare down to the bare minimum. This is a spilled puzzle where the pieces can be put together in exactly one way that will allow them to fit back into their box.