Day 96


11 May 2016

Contains affiliate links Was watching the great, star-studded and painful film Suffragette and observing how strong the link between behaviour and circumstance is. Women being radicalized, or in less politically-charged language, pressured into action by increasingly abusive situations.

Dramatic, exceptional, societal-norm-rejecting behaviour seems to be a fairly natural extension of excessive force. Or in other words, terrible experiences push people to react accordingly.

Must remember to consider and incorporate this in the rewrites, matching motivating factors to responses in personal development, particularly Cole’s, and also to a lesser degree, Haynfyv, Morriswan and Morristu, Lily, Sam… Maria. Even Ravel(s).

Everyone has some backstory and motivation except for Serov, who seems to be pretty purely evil, or at least, the source of his twistedness isn’t explored in detail… there’s a good chance it’ll get chalked up to possession based on the current outline, but that may be simplistic. Why was he vulnerable to possession? Is there innate evil (in the world of the Tower, anyways?), or is there always more to the story? Is he a product of his environment? One possible consequence of children ripped from their families and fit into moulds? Does the abuse in his story predate the Tower entirely? Was he simply an ‘empty vessel’? Does everyone really need a fully developed backstory anyways? Doesn’t that get tedious…? Gah.

Reading too many reviews messes with my head… But yeah, I think Cole’s catalyst for change needs to be explored more, or made more explicit. It’s more authentic for her to make slow, backsliding progress as she learns to question and be more decisive and responsible, but the turning points and decisions are muddy and unclear. This is partly the fault of my slow progress; her greatest growth, her experience of coming into power, doesn’t even get rolling until the next book (at this rate, anyways…)

At the very least, I think I need to get the ball rolling with some foreshadowing or early, uncontrolled displays of power midway or sooner through the first book. Again, rewrites. (Sigh…)

The pacing may be somewhat (very…) off, with masses of development and slow progress, and not enough excitement, magic, revelation etc. Twists n turns and all that good stuff. Or maybe I just get impatient because what would take hours to read takes me months to write… it’s very hard to get an accurate sense of the pacing when you progress a chapter at a time… Although, I figure that, in straight time spent, I write at roughly a fifth of my reading speed, which is pretty darn fast.

So there’s that…


Start Time: 12:00 pm

Location: couch/living room

Drinking: Bowmore Islay Scotch

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