Linda thought the ending of "Castle La Magie" was good. I do think it worked out pretty well, especially for a story I was stuck in. Not a lot of missteps.

Adding the Sister Executioners was what was needed: or, in other words, a second storyline.

Looking over "Ruby Red and the Robots," I can see that a second or even third plotline is needed. I thought  it was close to 40K words, but instead, I'm only up to 20K words, only a third of the way. Not sure if I want to even attempt to finish if that is true.

But for sure, the story isn't strong enough with just Ruby as narrator. Plus, I think I'll need to start from the beginning with it being a Spell Realm novel--that is, a future colonized world that has become magic.

Oh, well. First I do a final, final rewrite of "Takeover," then I take a long look.

Thinking over "Takeover," I think one of the problems is that I tried to make it true to life--and missed, because that's really hard--but by doing so, the story has almost a documentary tone to it, at least in the first half.

So I need to up the emotional responses of the characters, as much as I can. The "drama" if you will. "Dram" is hard from me on most books, but especially this one. I probably can't overdo it; I just don't write that way, so trying to up the emotional response is probably appropriate.

I don't know exactly how to do that. I'll have to think on it. But at least for the first hundred pages, I need to try.

For example, I have Hart behind rejected by Nicole, and therefore rebounding to the "other" woman. But I do it very briefly and dryly. I really need to put inner dialogue for all these characters, an emotional response for each of them. Lift this out of matter-of-factness.

At the same time, if I'm trying to make it real, I need to have as much authentic telling detail as possible. So I'm researching the Sagebrush Rebellion.

Theoretically, I'd like to put in a couple of inner dialogue parts on every page, and a couple of new telling details on every page, for the first 100 pages.

Of course, it may turn out that I do a bunch on one page and none on another, but that's what I'm going to set off trying to do.