This is part of an ongoing series where I’m documenting the development of my serial novel, Razor Mountain.
You can find my spoiler-free journals for each chapter, my spoiler-heavy pre-production journals, and the book itself over at the Razor Mountain landing page.
The book is complete, but there’s still one more thing to do: revise and edit! This final set of journals will follow the editing process.
Slow Going
When this post goes up, Razor Mountain will have been “in revision” for over a month. Unfortunately, I don’t have a whole lot to show for it. I’ve worked through the first few chapters, made some changes, and made notes for later.
In the past, I would probably have chalked that up to laziness and lack of a proper writerly work ethic. More recently, I’ve come to the understanding that if I’m spending a lot of time thinking about the writing, but not actually getting much done, it’s because I have some sort of mental block, and I need to work it out to move forward.
I suspect the problem here was a lack of accountability, or at least the lack of an audience. When I was writing chapters and posting them, there were reasons to keep up a steady pace. If I was slow with a chapter, my wife would often ask when the next one was coming. I would notice the longer-than-usual gap in my blog schedule. I had some feeling that the work was for someone.
Now that I’m revising, that dynamic has changed. I’m not reposting updated chapters, because it seems like a huge mess to track, and because they’re likely to get updated again in subsequent passes.
Luckily, since I came to this realization, I’ve gotten some new reasons to stay motivated and productive.
Progress
Let’s start with what I did get done. I spent some time reworking Chapter 2. This is the chapter that introduces God-Speaker. He has a very bad day when his mentor is unexpectedly killed by a stranger. This stranger is barely a character, and really has no clear explanation or bearing on the rest of the story. He’s just there to jump-start the plot.
No only is this not great storytelling, but it doesn’t really fit with what we know about paleolithic humans, which is that they generally worked together. War and infighting aren’t so much of a thing when everyone has to spend most of their energy just trying to survive for another season.
So, I did the obvious thing. I removed the stranger from the story, and I replaced him with a giant bear: Arctodus simus. The bear still serves the same purpose in the story, it just makes more sense and hopefully doesn’t leave the reader saying “why the heck did that happen?”
Chapter Zero?
There’s an issue that I’ve noticed in both God-Speaker and Christopher’s plot. In both cases, I wanted to start with some action and an inciting incident to drive the story forward. However, the reader hasn’t had enough time to form any attachment to either of these characters. There can only be so much tension when the reader doesn’t really care about the POV character.
One solution I’ve considered is adding earlier chapters to better show the lives of these characters before they’re knocked off-course by a cruel and uncaring universe. The challenge would be to create a new beginning to the book, still pulling the reader into the story without the benefit of all the big events that will happen in the current chapters 1 and 2.
I don’t know what I would put in those chapters yet, but I’m keeping it in mind as I work through the rest of the book.
Critiques
I got a lot of good feedback from Critters for Chapter 1, and after I was done with my bear business in Chapter 2, I submitted that as well. It takes a while to work through the queue, but the feedback came in this past week.
Additionally, I got a bite on my “request for dedicated readers,” which means I’ll have someone who can go through the whole book and provide feedback. This is much more appealing to me than slowly sending it through the standard process chapter-by-chapter, with no guarantee that anyone will follow the whole thing from beginning to end.
Along with that Critters volunteer, I’ve enlisted a handful of friends and family to serve as readers too.
Lighting a Fire
That’s all for now. Having more readers lined up lit a fire under me to do a quick read-through of the whole book and look for any high-level changes I want to make before getting that feedback. I expect that to keep me busy for the next week or two. After that, I’m sure I’ll have my hands full processing the feedback.
Words Deferred 