Guest Post and WIP Update!

I'm not putting up a long post here today because all of you should be heading over to Science In My Fiction to read the post I've put up there. It's on symbiosis and parasitism, and will hopefully generate SF plot bunnies. Go on, read it, comment. Shoo!

 And fine, if you want to stay here, I'll write a little more. A WIP update, maybe? Because I don't consider it long enough or interesting enough for a full post? Right then.

If you've been following the progress of my novel, you'll know that I keep having epiphanies about things that need to be fixed. I'm about to start the next round of implementation today, having written an admittedly somewhat bad denouement to tie up loose ends. I'm not too worried about the badness of it, since the stuff I'm adding on this pass is going to change things at the end anyway.

This pass is going to focus on Will, the protagonist, and his half of the narration. Will could stand to be stressed out a little more and his first chapter could use a bit more action and personal background, so I'm going to be beating him up again (or for the first time), giving him something to fail to accomplish in Chapter 1, and then [redacted for spoilers] which will result in lost sleep, hard questions, and possibly concerned relatives. The [redacted for spoilers] will also complicate the villain's half of the narration, which is a bonus. I'm excited to get started on this.

After that, Will's story should be "done" barring the next round of betaing, and I'll be switching my focus to the oh-so-fun-to-write villain. I need to give him a b-plot, which I haven't completely figured out yet, and I need to throw more wrenches into his arc than just the [redacted for spoilers]. One of the reasons I'm leaving him for last is because I have to figure this stuff out. Also, while I like writing in his voice, his thought processes scare me sometimes and it's a constant struggle to get him to describe anything. "What does the room you're in look like, Dan?" "It's a room." "What's in it?" "Chairs and a table." "Right then…"

So that's pretty much where things stand with the WIP. I'm going to stop writing here and start writing over there. And you're all going to read my guest post, yes?