Echo: The Weekly Update

No more word count until the next book; volume 3 is done and being edited.

Thanks to All Who Bought Echo!  And BIG THANKS to Melissa, Barbara, Ian, Lorna, [anonymous], Lisa, Meg, Matt, Bobby, F.T., Alice Smith, Leslie Coop, Richard, Shauna, Sydney, Pam, Jessica, Angela, Kiesa, Ross, Keith, and Alice for posting AMAZING reviews on Amazon!!!  Ashley too for the 5 star on Nook!

News:  I fried my brain yesterday going through 40k words, feeling about as insecure as I ever have, wondering if I bit off more than I can chew.  I know a few of you are interested in the travails of a budding writer, so here’s my latest one:  How to keep the pace going when you’re switching between multiple characters.

Now in the previous books, my hero is basically going through life and making a lot of observations on it.  In this book, I have TWO protagonists, and I think somewhere along the line I unconsciously realized that putting the same level of introspection into both characters would muddy the pace; this realization crystallized in my mind as I was reading Dark Tower 6.  I personally feel that the reader can’t effectively bounce back and forth between two separate characters if there’s too much introspection.  If I switch between Susannah Dean and back to Roland, I’d like to know that I won’t have to read too much before I learn what happened to Susannah.  That was an unconscious (in the beginning) consideration in Echo 3.  Later it became a conscious one.

In a nutshell:  This book has a lot more moving parts than the others.  I have a scene where some guy’s hair is grown back, where in the beginning he had decided to shave it.  I had to sit down and suss out a paragraph that explained why he stopped shaving it.  Hair!

So anyways, I’m closing in on my last 20k words, seeing if I can spruce things up a bit here or a bit there, but I’ve already gone way over my deadline on this book, and honestly I don’t know whether it’s readable or not anymore.  Tomorrow was the last day I said I’d be able to edit, and I plan on holding true to that promise.  Book 4 is already knocking on the door of my mind.

Anyways, writer problems, right?  If you are a writer, I wish you inspired drafting and insightful editing.  And as always, back to work!