This time is the Last Time.

Almost done with Faerylander rewrite #2000 or so.   This is it.  No  more.

To follow up on yesterday's dilemma.  I decided that I wouldn't use the C.S. Lewis and Charles William meeting (which was a mash-up of two weak chapters, but still weak).  I really wanted them to be among the authors of the "strange and macabre" that Cobb interviews, but it wasn't to be.

I'm sticking with Poe, Lovecraft, Howard, Tolkien and the unnamed Holocaust author, most of them in the first third of the book.

I also decided not to use the new powerful Faery creature that Cobb goes to meet.  Too late in the book to introduce a new major character, especially a totally new made up one (especially when I'm already introducing a new major character in a couple of chapters though not as "major" as she was before, because I'm taking out the love-story element.)

I put the Old God's perspective chapter in with another chapter, instead.

The chapter I actually wrote is Cobb's confrontation with the whiskey bottle, his transformation into his Dragon form, his flying to Faery and being tempted to stay, and then reluctantly deciding to return to Mortal Realms and ask humans for help confronting Cthuhlu.

It was fun to write some new material.  That's the part I always like.

I then put the rest of the book into sequence to see how long it would be.  It came out at 95K instead of 101K, which isn't as much of a cut as I expected -- but then again, I probably added about 2K in new material, so the overall cut was about 8K or so.

I still have two scenes to write, one of them the final scene which obviously is very important.  I'm always leery of being anything but inspired when I write the final chapter -- which is often why I leave them for last.  (Last chapter, heh.  But what I mean is, I will often do major rewriting before I go back and do the last chapter for reals.)

So by the end of the day, the basic structure of the book will be in place.  Then it's just a matter of rewriting, making it work.  I'm going to send it off the Beta readers and editors and hope that the whole thing works.

No matter what, this time I swear is the last time.

Went to writer's group, and there were four readers and fighting my impulse, I let the others read first and then there wasn't time for me to read.  I was slightly peeved, but I knew it would probably happen, and to put it in perspective, I've probably read at every writer's group for a couple of years -- and often was the only one reading...