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In Process -- August 2019


Wind/Water/Salt
Chapter 18: Finished and posted. A consistent comment about the chapters I post is there’s not a lot of tension. So I tried to make some forward-moving tension here. Let’s see how it works! 

I think in my first draft I did a pretty good job roughing in the plot, but there’s a ton of details that are missing. I sort of feel like I’ve gone about this edit the wrong way. Instead of trying to polish each chapter, I could have done a pass all the way through with background characters, and another with I don’t know what. Okay, that wouldn’t work, I need to just do it the way I am. And in fact, now is the time for me to be introducing all those secondary characters, because Fairfax didn’t know them at the start and only is getting to know them now, and Preston and Abigail weren’t in town until now. The second third of the story really moves the story into town and opens up the characters to their greater inspection, so this is when I needed that realization anyway. That awful book about the Salem witch trials really came at the right time. 

So, I worked on my secondary characters a lot, and my map and calendar. I pulled out all my notes looking for names and characters and relationships I’d created that… I hadn’t really used yet.

Chapter 19: Added characters.

Chapter 20: Did one clean-up pass.

Persephone
Started with those Jane Ann McLachlan things here because it was a better fit. I’m not attached to one opening yet, or one plot structure. The hardest part was finding a suitable notebook! I don’t want to write these on my usual scrap paper. I have been extremely resistant to accepting that one of my plots is a romance, but here we are.

Connecting
Critted  10
Got back 7

Subs
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Knitting
FI Corset belt. Started month half done. If this is going to get finished, maybe I will not start something else until it or all the socks are done. 

Midsummer Aran (IK Summer 2013). Started the month with the sleeves just attached to the body. I could get the instructions for the divide for neckline to look anything like the photos, so I basically faked it up. I wound up with a couple of weird patches of stocking stitch on the front where the neckline decreases were, and ripped out about three inches to get rid of that, which was horrible but after all the work I put into this sweater, it was worth it. Finished Stranger Things. 

Blue skies of winter (KP 2015 FI) Except mine is yellow, on two cones. Yellow skies of winter? Eeew. I started this because this year’s rule is I can buy one ball of yarn for every cone I finish, and I need to buy three balls of yarn for Jean Moss’s Candlemas, which I want to start for Christmas. And because large portions of this don’t need attention, and I need a project that I can knit while reading the entire internet every weekend, to alleviate my guilt.

Crystalline socks (New Directions in Sock Knitting). The yarn is on a cone, so I might be able to use up a cone, and someday I will have enough yarn to make Candlemas.  These are done, so now I have to start another pair of socks, I guess.

In sewing news, I cut out a dress.

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