Instilling mystery.

I'm pretty disciplined when I'm writing.  I work every designated day.  But I took yesterday off.  I went to the see the doctor in the morning for a physical, which I passed just fine.  But then I felt so relieved all day, that I just sort of enjoyed it.  Why was I so certain he'd find something wrong with me?

I will finish Ghostlander in the next writing session.

Anyway, after celebrating with a hamburger and fries, followed by some donuts  (Name for a donut shop:  "Do...or donut") I looked at what my friend Dave Goodman said about Faerylander.

He did a really great editing job.  Plus he had some great suggestions. 

The gist of his suggestions is that I need to reveal things more slowly, and to make it more of a mystery.

This has been sort of a problem from the beginning.  My original intention was to do this, but when I tried, it came off as completely ingenuous.  For one thing, I had these Famous Author chapters where they reveal all. 

I was constantly having the character saying,  "For the first time, he realized..." in variations.  But there is only so many time you can use that phrase.  Technically, you can only use that phrase once.

Anyway, I gave up on it and just started supplying the information as it came up.  I tried to replace the 'mystery' with a 'threat'; a time urgency, a kidnapped child, etc.

The main character of the story is a powerful exiled Faery creature, who each time he uses magic loses some of his memory.  So Dave's idea is that this character rediscovers the truth each time, rather than learns it just once.

Which is rather clever, but probably difficult to pull off.

I asked him if he wanted to "move things around" to show me how he'd do it, and he agreed, so I'm hoping I can re-instill some of the mystery without massive rewrites.

So...I can't believe I'm even contemplating this...I might do so more rewriting on this book.  But...I am not going to throw everything in the air again.  If I can find a clever way to make the changes I will, but if it requires starting from scratch, uh,uh.