Die, Die, Die, My Darling

MAGICTOWN has gotten away from me.

The flashback has grown, like a malignant cancer, across the storyscape of my novel. Good, healthy pages that were set aside for use in telling the present story have been perverted for use by this flashback sequence. At nearly twenty pages now, it encompasses nearly a tenth of the goal length of the book.

And that’s just flat unacceptable.

So, I think it is time to take scalpel to the unchecked growth and cut it out. The idea for a flashback was sound, but I think I ended up getting too specific, giving too much away. I was killing the mystery, slowly and without dignity.

It is time to bring my mind and the reader’s eye back to the present. Now that I know what happened in the past, I can leave clues for the reader to infer what happened. Let them fill in the bits so I don’t have to write them.

I’ve been reading quite a bit more in the last few weeks than I have in the previous months. I felt my brain getting soft in a post-holiday binge of video games and other novelties. I included some young adult fiction in my reading, and the cleanliness of the prose really appealed to me. The editorial knife had cut all the way down to the bone and sinew, taking some meat with it, but leaving the story with just the basics it needed to function. Keep it simple, keep it clean. Two things that I can same I’m guilty of not doing.

For Monday, I think I’m going to rebuild my roadmap for the novel. It was one of the things that I lost in the Great Harddrive Collapse of 2009. Well, that and the finished script for THE PINEAPPLE PRIMARY. I’ve still got it in my head, but it is much looser, and I think if I’m going to stick with the serialized aspect of MAGICTOWN, it is a must to have strict guidelines that must be adhered to.

I like the story. I understand the characters now. I just have to put things back in order and hold the leash tighter.

Discipline in everything.