PSA for the holidays & an Update on Day 3 of the Year-End Project

PSA: looking for that last-minute downloadable gift? Something to read on the long trip to Grandma’s house?  DRM-free fiction at BookView Cafe!  Holiday Sale!

(and yes, this is a sideways reminder that my DRAGON VIRUS, FROM WHENCE YOU CAME, and PRACTICAL MEERKAT’S 52 BITS OF USEFUL INFORMATION are available direct from the publisher here…. but also books from Vonda McIntyre, Pat Rice, Judith Tarr, Chris Dolley, and many others…)

 

Meanwhile, the Project Push continues…

Goal: Goal: to have 50k words in polished working order by 1 January.
Day 2: Beat the hell out of fine-tuned Chapter 1.
Day 1: Got the errata, notes, and existing text imported into Scrivener. Created a character call-sheet.
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Today, I moved on to chapter two, and a change in POV characters. Also, different languages. A portion of the afternoon was spent tracking down the right word in German to convey a feeling, and we’re still not sure we got it right. But all hail Twitter, where I can discuss it with native German speakers, within five minutes of asking the question. :-)

Her courage began to fade.  What had she been thinking?  She was a nobody, a would-be, mochtegern, her only entrée into this society her family’s name, and her cousin’s patronage

“Virginie!”  As though thinking of family drew her eye, her hostess spotted her, moving through a crowd that gave way obediently.  “Ma petite, you look lovely.  Tired, and has no-one been feeding you?  But lovely.”
I also had to do some follow-up research on Parisian townhouses, cigarette lighters, and sea travel in the relevant time period.  Oh, how I suffer…

I had a sudden thought about this second character (henceforth: Gigi, as per la_marquise_de_‘s helpful commentary), that required rethinking certain things that happen down the road.  Her greatest desire will be granted, but nowhere in the way she expected.  Of course, she never expected her greatest desire would happen, anyway. In the meanwhile, I spent half an hour trying to rework the opening paragraph.  Fiddly fiddly bits.  Then I sailed through the next thousand or so words, because I’d already been so fiddly with it before.

Only about 5k words fine-tuned today.  I blame the arrival of a New! Bookcase! for distracting me…

(I am hesitant to do a full word-count on the project, since I’m doing a lot of pruning and fine-turning right now.  Would people find it of interest, to see how the count goes up and down?)