So, the bad news is that starting tomorrow I'm on vacation. No, wait, that's good news! It really is. Cheryl and I are going to bike chunks of the C&O Canal, plus a few other greenways in Virginia and Maryland, for a weeklong getaway doing our favorite pastime. I need this vacation more than I can express. It's been a stressful few months at work, combined with designing brochures and planning events for the Friends of the Orange County Library, combined with rewriting a novel, combined with getting two audiobooks into production. (More on that soon!) A week away from computers is going to be exactly what I need.
The only downside is that I didn't hit my personal deadline of finishing the second draft in time to get the book ready for publication in time for ConCarolinas in early June. But, I knew that was an aggressive deadline when I set it. I should still be done with the second draft early in June, and my new target is to get this put together in time to debut at SuperCon in early July.
The good news is that the second draft is pulling together really well. The characters are getting sharper and more detailed, and the subplots are weaving together much better than they did the first time around. The plot hole keep getting smaller and smaller. I still have a distant villain problem. The master villain really doesn't get revealed until the last ten chapters, and while I don't feel like the revelation is going to come completely out of nowhere, it's also tough to get into a villain's head when they are so far removed from the overall plot. The villain's minions are present, of course, but they don't do much to reveal the true motives of the mastermind. Solving this so that the bad guy seems like a genuine threat instead of someone sending out cannon fodder villains for no apparent reason in the early pages is so far going to be my biggest challenge in the next draft.
Hopefully, when I get back from vacation, the way forward will be apparent.
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