Weekend update (from Birnam Wood, perhaps)

[lolmac]

It’s certainly not from Chevy Chase. It’s actually from Idaho, where I’m visiting my sister, whilst the ever-magnificent pepper_field covers RDA Daily for the weekend, freeing me from Internet Schedule Angst.

For those who remember that I had entered the Unicorm Pegasus Kitten fanfic contest: the winners were announced, and I’m not one of them. Sigh. I have been working my way through the disappointment and ego-bruise. I promise I’ll stop sulking soon.

I’ve also been continuing to make progress on chapter 15 of Reverb, and it is nearly done. In the meanwhile, I realised I hadn’t posted the teaser and link to chapter 14 back when that went live!

Now, some of you are not reading Reverb at all; some of you intend to read it, but not till it’s finished; so it doesn’t make any difference to you whether I post here or not. Some of you have been following it with ego-gratifying enthusiasm, and you’ve already read the most recent chapter. So why the heck should I bother to do a post for it here?

One thought does occur to me: that was the chapter with the Biggest Reveal Yet. On fanfic.net, I had to throw in my usual killjoy reminder pretty please not to leave spoilers in reviews, with an encouragement to contact me directly with any spoilerific comments.

You can probably guess where this is going. Those of you who are reading Reverb: would you like me to do a Chapter 14 post here, so we can chat about it in the comments in a clearly declared Spoilery Zone? I don’t want to do a post and then not get any traffic; I doubt that my ego has the resilience just now to endure a round of silence and chirping crickets.

'Beth
August 2010

ETA:  The Chapter 14 post for Reverb is here.

Comments

[lolmac]

Chapter 15 is the last chapter; there will be an epilogue tidying up loose subplot threads, but the plot is already wound up. (As I said, chapter 15 is almost finished; I'm cleaning up details, filling in transitions, checking continuity.)

My longer stories tend to grow new segments internally -- a chapter will twin into two chapters, because I find out that there was more in the structure that needed, or deserved, further exploration. I used to try to prevent this, because I dreaded self-indulgent sprawl; I allow it a lot more now, but every expansion has to earn its survival.

Put another way, my Niggle's Tree will grow a bulkier trunk or main branch, but it's very unlikely to sprout a whole new branch and sprawl merrily off into a new section of canvas, especially not towards the end, when I'm tying the threads back together into the composition.

ETA: Word count: check the word meter on my main LJ page -- the story is projected at 80k, and I'm at 77k including Chapter 15. It's a full-sized novel.