Some Slightly Rambling Thoughts on Book Four

I’ve been through my Fourth Book three times since the start of the year—revising, consolidating, expanding. Really, above all else, enjoying. The book’s a simple pleasure to read, every chapter leaving me almost breathless, yearning to read on. It’s a wonderful feeling.

Every time I go through, though, I find something new that I missed, some avenue I left unexplored, some character that seems unfulfilled, underdeveloped. And on each pass, I do a little more, toss in a few details, nick certain phrases or section, reposition an odd paragraph, shift what was just a minor thing into a major reconstruction.

Yes, obviously, I’ve been making ample use of the IDEAS note on my phone.

I even had to name a new character the other day—one of my favorite aspects of constructing a story, particular this one as it focuses on historical rather than contemporary names, and they’re just fun to pick from. To bring a balance, though, given this book has the most named characters of anything I’ve written to date, I referred to my Characters database and narrowed my options to the only letters I hadn’t used yet within this piece: F, I, O, Q, U, X, Y and Z.

Bet you can’t guess which I ended up checking off. We seriously need more popular names that start with vowels other than A and E.

One big, rather recent, idea I had requires a bit of research. I know, I know, I’ve delayed this book long enough due to poorly managed research, but this is different. See, I’ve already got a notion of what I want to do with it—it involves a certain literary classic, already namedropped in what I had thought a modestly throwaway train of thought. What I realized was that this classic is a mirrored allegory for Book Four as a whole. And while I don’t want to exploit that further than my subconscious mind noticed and pushed me to include, I also want to be sure I have the finer details right, that the proper connections can be made.

Basically, I need to read a book.

Problem is, though I think I read it back in high school, I no longer own a copy of the book. So, might be I need to head to the library this weekend, might be I’ll drop by my favorite local used book store. I mean, I really don’t think I need to give extra money to publishers for something that was published 130 years ago, do you?

Until then, though, on to round number four. I’ve other ideas I need to cross off.

Comments