The conquering hero has...

...certainly not returned in the person of yours truly. I haven't been doing any conquering and I'm definitely no hero. Heck, I never did get this new electron box entirely squared away to my liking. I simply decided that I had hit the point where it was no longer worth trying to get my new Vista machine to act like my well and truly tweaked old XP one. I may still, at some point in the future, install a different OS, but I just don't feel like messing with it anymore.

As for the book? Ah, such stories I could tell...which I think is the point. I'm not sure anymore. Somewhere in the midst of trying to write the final battle sequence from several dozen viewpoints, as opposed to the three from the rest of the book, I realized that I had gone way over the thirty thousand word goal I had set for myself. Not just that, but the battle had only just reached the point where the plan falls apart.* In other words, it was only just getting involved. The problem is that each viewpoint character has a role throughout the entirety of the battle, so I didn't want to just skip one viewpoint ahead while the viewpoint is covering another angle.

Well, that particular method of reading about a battle may be the joy of historians attempting to recreate an entire battle, it's not such a good way for a novice author to tell a story. I am sure anyone reading it as it currently is (I'm not even close to finished fixing it) would quickly become bored with reading about the same event, over and over, but from different viewpoints. It only worked in Vantage because; one, each revealed a good bit of new information and two, there were only a few viewpoints, not dozens.

So I've been fixing it in segments, deciding what events can simply be summarized afterward, likely by whatever poor bastards lived through them, what should the protagonist be aware of, what can be revealed by one-off viewpoints (like a narrator or a bad guy), and what to just pare away as excessive (probably a lot).

In other words, not the best of times as far as writing goes. That's okay though, I think I'll maintain sufficient motivation simply because I'm so close to being done. Then I get to start on the next one having already learned everything I did from this one. Hopefully, that'll help me avoid the problem I'm having currently, without which I think I'd be done by now and well into editing.

Oh well.

I have a few posts planned out regarding current events. I might even do them today, but that depends on how frustrated I get with writing. So, if I end up burning up the intratubes, it means I've gotten frustrated. In any event, I won't say watch this space.

*I suppose that could be a spoiler, but I doubt anyone who reads through the rest of book would be even a little surprised. The characters sure aren't.