Writing this in advance because I am now on holiday (Romania). No posting next week.

My plan this week was to do some plotting of the Lily POV. Given that she alternates with Simon, my first step was to work out how many chapters she needed to provide one per Simon’s chapters: 18.

Eighteen! Isn’t it funny that I can write 140,000 words by narrowing my focus on a daily word limit and yet fall to pieces at the thought of writing a mere 18 chapters…Oh, god, it’s too hard. This is why I don’t plot ahead!

OK, the next step was to check my original (mostly incomplete and awful) draft for Lily, and discover I have at least 12 of those chapters already written in some shoddy form or another, with sure knowledge of another three absolutely necessary (in terms of getting her to where she needs to be for the climax) chapters that still have to be written. That means 15 of the scenes are already plotted. That’s not so bad.

Then, reviewing the first two Lily scenes, I realised they would work better as shorter chapters broken up. In other words, rather than trying to match the length of Simon’s chapters, which are generally 10-12 pages long, Lily’s voice – which is introspective, selfish and kind of shrill – works much better in short doses, especially from the point of view of the poor reader. So with an aim of 3-6 pages per Lily chapter, I’m now only looking at 1500-3000 words per each scene. With the breaking up of earlier chapters, now I’m looking at potentially too many scenes for her, rather than too few, which is nice (it means I don’t have to make up unnecessary events just to give her something to do in one of her chapters; I hate it in other people’s books, I’d hate to commit the crime in my own).

It’s intense work writing her, despite the short length of her scenes. Simon does his damnest to stay out of his own head, so it’s all sharp dialogue and movement and externalities with him; he’s fun to write, he’s funny himself and he has funny characters around him. Lily is wallowing in her own head, with little dialogue but lots of sensations and a constant feeling of being overwhelmed (she starts the book unstable with pious guilt and her emotional state only gets worse from there), plus she’s surrounded by the moral high-ground Liberationists who are all earnest and noble and serious and there’s just not a lot of comic relief there. In addition, it’s a very different writing style for me, and feels unnatural – I can’t have an entire two pages with no dialogue! I love dialogue!

On the other hand, her voice is very distinct from Simon’s, which is a nice achievement given this is my first try at interweaving two POVs (I tried it in the book I’m supposed to be editing and yet have not touched for a year, and while the other voice would start off beautifully distinct from Rana (the surviving POV), they would eventually converge: two teenage girls, not different enough. So I dumped one).

I am aiming to do about three scenes a week once I’m back from holiday (I’ve already knocked the first three into decent shape, so that leaves fifteen). This should mean I’ll be easily finished by the time I head home to Australia in early December (Easily? Touch wood / inshallah), and that longer break will be a useful way to make myself put the book completely aside for a while before the last, ‘prettifying’ pass through.