29 October 2002

Well. The first part of Brothers In Arms is finished, and K.T. and I are well into the second part. K.T. spent some time this weekend putting the assorted pieces and snippets of story together into discrete chapters - sixteen of them, to be precise, most of them around fifteen pages each. (There are a couple of very short chapters that we're thinking about stretching, and a couple of very long chapters that we might chop into smaller bits.)

Yesterday, I sat down and read all the way through all two-hundred-odd pages, the way it's supposed to be read.

Typos and spelling errors abound. (Some of the typos are darned funny. "She grabbed the front of his short," is my particular favorite. Spelling errors are amusing only in their consistency. I can't seem to spell "niece" to save my life, while K.T. is absolutely determined to put an extra b in "sibling.") We changed one minor character's name and forgot to update it in one chapter. Another character does something so important, we've got her doing it twice. We're over-familiar with the characters, so we didn't do enough introductory description for most of them. We desperately need to introduce the assorted cultures a little more explicitly - religions and symbology in particular. The pacing could use some work.

We still have dialogue here and there that's strange and disjointed - a remnant of its IRC origins. And there are back-stories that get filled in multiple times - remnant of its short-story origins. We're using way too many adverbs. (In particular, the words "lightly" and "faintly" need to go.) We've got run-on sentences and awkward sentences and "word of the day" syndrome. Both K.T. and I have our own special grammatical quirks that need to be fixed - even when they're not precisely wrong, we need to smooth them out some for consistency's sake.

But still... It was good. For all the times my hand twitched toward the red pen on my desk (despite the fact that I was reading it electronically), I still couldn't stop reading. The characters had wonderful and individual personalities. The ones who were supposed to be likeable were likeable. The ones who were supposed to be scum were scummy. The ones who were unknowns were mysterious without being mysteeeeeeeeerious. The intrigue plot was solved with just the right balance of intelligence and coincidence. The romance was compelling.

It's a diamond still very much in the rough... But I liked it, very much. I'm eager to see what it's like when it's been polished a little.

There's a lot of work left to go - the second half of the book is only about two-thirds written, with the hardest bits left to do; and all the editing I just listed... But it's a good story, and it's a good book, and I'm proud of us.

(By the way, now that the first part is finished, we could use editors. We could use all the constructive criticism we can get, in fact. If you'd like to help out, please let me know. It's an unpaid gig, I'm afraid, but you'll have our undying gratitude.)

--Liz