ellarien | Sunday writing update (Reply)

It's been a struggle, this week. It doesn't help that I've been reading over the completely different novel that I abandoned as a finished first draft over ten years ago, and I know I'm not writing at anything like that level of skill now. There are reasons, but I don't know how many of them are fixable; one of them may be the damage I did to my language-processing systems by moving to the US, and another is that when I was writing the first chapters of Intersection I was not working full time and had been focussed on writing for months, polishing yet another novel-length thing to a high gloss while I planned Intersection.

Intersection isn't perfect, of course. In places it's painfully obvious what I'd been reading recently; there's a very Hambly-esque musical dragon in the first section of the prologue, for example. The plot is fairly linear, with only a couple of sub-plots, and the world-building features an all-encompassing Evil Company that owns everything including -- quite openly and officially -- the government. It does have metaphor and simile and sensory detail, though, and I was mostly managing to stop the adverbial speech tags before they made it onto the page. In contrast, Behemoth 47 as currently realized looks an amateurish mess, and I have real doubts about my ability to fix it in rewrite. Still, I've come this far and I might as well push on to the end.