Skinsongs progress...

[martinlivings]

Well, this week has turned into, pardon the pun, a write-off. The week's break last week has convinced me of something I already knew but was unwilling to admit - Skinsongs isn't working in its current form. It's headed in the wrong direction. Now, I COULD change the direction from this point onwards, but I don't think that'd be doing it justice. So I'm going to have to do the unthinkable, something Stephen King says never to do, and go back to the start and rewrite from scratch. I made some serious character and plotting mistakes in the first forty thousand words that need to be corrected before I can continue.

Bugger.

So, the rest of this week is dedicated to that. It's more an edit than a complete rewrite, the basic skeleton of the plot is still pretty much correct, I just need to fix a few things. Mainly:

• Upgrade the tech so it's consistent - I have automatic plastic surgery machines, yet everything else is pretty much as it is today, which makes no sense.
  
• Swap the fannish qualities of Trace and her flatmate. At this stage, the flatmate was the skinsongs fan, while Trace was a cynic. This meant that she didn't really want to be doing any of this, and was not emotionally involved. It also meant she dragged her feet at every friggin' opportunity, making the book slow toi a crawl. Stoopid characters. So I'm swapping part of her brain with Noni's. Let's see how she likes that!

So, no word counts until I'm back up to date. I suspect this will make the book shrink a little. I hope it will, actually, as I'm 40000 words in and nothing much has happened yet. Let's streamline the beast a little!

And maybe, just maybe, get me excited about it again.