writing progress report, notable for the lack of actual progress

[edenfalling]

"Secrets" chapter 10 is at 5,900 words, complete with more unexpected dialogue from Electra... who proceeded to derail my outline and send Ginny off onto yet another tangent. *headdesk* I often get the feeling that my stories are at least 35% tangential digression, and sometimes as high as 65% digression. This isn't necessarily a bad thing -- digressions can make a story feel more realistic and less like the product of a clockwork plot -- but it can be massively irritating to me when I'm trying to get from point A to point B, and suddenly I discover points G, S, and W shoving their way into the mix.

I've also been cleaning up some old original stories -- aichmetes, do you remember "Sisters," that story I sent you to read to people back at Bryn Mawr? I left that in a partially revised form a couple years ago, since I was sick of looking at it and didn't have the perspective to finish cleaning it up. I am now going back and doing my damndest to weed out the excessive melodrama and make the cultural background information fit in smoothly instead of lying around in huge infodump chunks.

I also twiddled a bit on "Finding Marea," which mostly involved working out an internally consistent numerology system, since Harai seems rather enamored of finding omens in the dates of various events. It's kind of a cool system, actually, which goes from 0 to 17 in two sets of nine numbers -- each set has a 'real' value and then a sort of 'shadow' value based on its corresponding number in the other set. So 1 mirrors 10, 2 mirrors 11, and so on until 9 ends up mirroring 0, because the ordering is screwy that way.

I have way too much fun inventing stuff like that.