The ending section I have for the former GN is all fluff. It's fun fluff, but I'll need to tie it to the front part better. Maybe one thing to do is keep track of issues raised (i.e. stumbling blocks thrown in the MC's path) in the front part, and try to show them being relieved them one by one at the end? Not sure. Somehow I want the reader to be rooting for the MC to make a choice that maybe isn't the wisest course, and in retrospect will turn out to be a very bad idea with dire and far-reaching consequences. Somehow I need to get past all that and make the reader want her to make that choice.

The formatting I have (at the moment) for the main story:

paragraph breaks rather than indents
text of each page centered top-to-bottom
border around the text
as the story progresses toward the last chapter, margins get wider, text gets less space, borders get tighter--all still centered

Formatting for the out-of-POV clips:

same, but no borders and the margins are always standard.

And at the moment the title is Boundaries. Don't know if this will hold up; none of the other title ideas have. But it's working for me at the moment, and so is the formatting, although I know I probably can't submit a ms that looks like this. However, if the clips end up remaining in the ms then the formatting may have to stand till an editor sees it, because so far I can't think of a better way to show the differences between the clips and the main story. Right now I feel that changing fonts is not strong enough. I know it's best to standardize the format and let the words speak for themselves, but that's not enough here. Here, the form helps tell the story.

Of course, there's always the worry that I'm just being Russell Crowe in that shed in the backyard in A Beautiful Mind--that my ms will end up being only the sad and strange evidence of a disordered mind. And I know from Beating Heart that a lot of people don't get formatting that's tied to story.

Nevertheless, I press on. Now that I think about it, I need to go through the entire back half of the ms and reconsider each scene. That part was all written as a GN, so of course it comes off as a little glib now, when all that's left is dialog. The front part was conceived as prose-ish, so it's more...I dunno what to call it. The ideas are more concise, concrete, and separate, whereas the later ms flows from scene to scene and you can't tell them apart without pictures. I need to fix the later ms so it's a series of punches, and I can get my mind around each individual punch.

So, where to start? At the moment, I am clueless. First order of the day: get a clue.

No writing time yet today, but I'm going to get some in tonight. I hope. Still thinking about format. Saw a snide comment re. Beating Heart, saying that apparently the only reason for the format was a desire to waste trees. Yeah, that's why my next book will only have one word per page. The book will be 60,000 pages thick. With any luck, I can devastate an entire forest in one go.

Picked up Fable II and a player's guide today. I don't have time to get hooked on a video game, but boy, if I did, this is probably the one I'd play. I like the idea of creating a character over time through decisions and actions. I leafed through the beginning of the guide whilst between errands, and thought the distinction between morality and purity was interesting. Morality refers to choices that affect others; purity to choices that affect only yourself. And all your choices, of every kind, reverberate down the game, changing your options as you become more good or more evil.

The first Fable (or maybe the expansion pack?) had brothels to visit, and you could get married, but this seems to go a step farther because you also have a choice about wearing a condom or not (I don't think that was in the first one). The guide says that if you have unprotected sex with your spouse, you may have a baby instantly--no pregnancy, the kid's just there. That means you must continue to provide money for it, visit it, and bring it gifts.

If you have unprotected sex at a brothel, you can get a disease--no idea what happens after that, if it takes away health or kills you or makes you pay through the nose for a cure or what. But...this is interesting, and I'm not sure what I think about it--if you use a condom at a brothel, you get a purity bonus that can exceed the corruption points earned for doing the deed with for-pay partners in the first place.

Needless to say, this is rated M. However, I expect many, many young teens will be playing it. Perhaps even while their parents are out picking on librarians for having a book with the word "scrotum" in it.

I pulled all the myth/slant sections out and put them into their own document, so I could play around with them and see them more clearly. Immediately they started taking on a snarky, vitriolic tone that almost addresses the reader directly. Then I had to stop and go pick up a kid from school and I was thinking along the way that maybe the way to tie the whole thing together is to switch the Helen parts to third person present rather than first person present.

At first glance this seems like a promising fit, because the main thing that bothered me about doing this particular novel in this experimental format--one of the things that made me think GN in the first place--was that Helen's voice feels smarmy to me. I did half of Beating Heart in a floaty kind of lyrical first person, but that has always felt wrong here, like more of the same, like the inside of my head is turning into a cute Disney ride and I need to go take apart a car engine and get grime under my fingernails and grease in the creases of my knuckles.

The irony is that I've been comparing Helen's voice to the dead girl's voice in Beating Heart and feeling icky about it, when now it looks like I should have been thinking of the other viewpoint character in Beating Heart, the living guy.

Because his parts of BH had the same d*mn problem. The exact same! I couldn't figure out how to do his parts because they felt smarmy and icky compared to dead Cora's lyricism, so--I swear, I did this--I wrote all his parts out as a GN. That gave me a foot in the door to start thinking about his half of the story in a different way. The GN was a step that I had to go through to get my head going in a new direction. It led me to trying his half as a very flat, matter-of-fact, third-person present that in no way competed with Cora's evocative voice.

I can't believe I didn't notice this before.

The thing is, even just working on this revamped Helen idea for a little over a day, I can tell that the whole project is forcibly trying to take a strong 90 degree turn and become about the issue that drives me, which is not Helen's story (that's why I have zero interest in world-building for this ms, and why it has never wanted to have traditionally set scenes; the fictional world doesn't interest me much and I don't care about drawing the reader into it).

The issue that propels me with this ms is unfairness; the way people rewrite history and situations to make themselves look better by scapegoating others. The unfairness comes in because traditionally it's the ones who do the writing who get to set the stories down in stone--which for the most part means white men of property and education. Everybody else in history pretty much gets badmouthed, condescended to, and blamed.

I think for now I'm going to let it proceed with the vitriolic snarky tone, and let Helen's parts fall into a neutral third person, and see where that goes. This is not my usual kind of thing, because (I was just telling some students this a couple of days ago, ironically) most of the time I don't like to make a big moral deal out of a book and tell people what to think. Most of the time I like to ask questions and leave them hanging, and the reader can either extrapolate from the rest of the book what my own opinion is...or not.

So if the ms continues this way, it will be a far cry from my other books, and perhaps more like my private e-mails to friends, in which I am vitriolic and snarky a goodly portion of the time. Of course, what with all the sex and violence and the lack of good role models and the weird form, that means this ms will be a tough sell. However, I work better that way. I work better out on a limb that's half sawed off, especially when the work means turning around to saw that limb the rest of the way through.