Mysterious advancing deadlines, point of view, and the Meat Planet
Breaking news: my work schedule got rearranged a bit this week, and some deadlines were moved up. This will necessitate a Veil War Friday post.
Now, admission time: I could have posted anyway. But as I wrote deeper into battle, I came to a sudden realization. My insistance on maintaining the point of view on Captain Lewis had gone too far. It was a convention, really; nothing more. And most of the story as I’ve related it to you worked fine enough within that constraint; so it was a helpful tool for a neophyte writer to keep me focused on the story and not get distracted. It has always been my intent that in the final novel version, that constraint would be relaxed. I have Lance Criminal Adventures starring Coleman, and small sections told from the point of view of Evans and Pethoukis already written. I had also planned to rewrite parts of some chapters to shift the point of view to another character for variety and dramatic purposes.
So, my realization was that most of the next chapter really can’t be told from where Lewis stands without serious contortions. And seeing how contorted it had become, I decided to relax my rules early and rewrite now. Much of the prose can be saved, of course; descriptions of ‘splosions, booms and chopping are the universal language of love after all. Still and all it requires some effort, and that’s what I’ll be doing tonight.
In the meantime, enjoy this lost episode of Carl Sagan’s justly famed science series, Cosmos:
The Veil War 