Samhain Progress

I thought I'd just give a little update on progress with the novel. I managed to lose some of my work when I dropped my laptop (clumsy error) but have since discovered many of the missing pieces. In the end I'm only a few hundred words behind, which is better than it could've been!

I'm still writing the difficult middle passages, during which my heroine is subjected to quite a lot of abuse and tragedy. I've never had so much empathy for a character, so putting her through so much is very difficult for me. It feels utterly cruel, but I have to distance myself from that feeling as much as possible, as the entire point of the book is to explore what happens to people in times of hardship. With these moments of terror and crisis, I think it's going to be important to introduce a motif of some sort, which I have borrowed from a much older dream, and the painting it inspired. This will hopefully fuse her experiences together into a coherent menace, whose eventual consequences will now make more sense.

The third half of the book, which is a little lighter in its tone but answers many questions about my harsh alterworld, now has a greater degree of focus. I've been trying to avoid a picaresque structure with the action moving too quickly from place to place, so some of my new alterations to the final acts are designed to put definite purpose behind movements and motivations.

I have always been tempted to introduce a character for an element of comic relief during the middle of the novel, who would then become central to the events of the final act. But I haven't been able to satisfy my desire not to disturb the overall tone of the book with this character, so he will essentially be removed for good. This is a shame, and many may find the idea of the book's bleakness overwhelming, but I have to emphatically reassure people that there is a positivist message behind the story as a whole. This will now be more difficult to achieve, but I can't risk interrupting the more sombre, lyrical flow of the book for turns of comedy. It's just not what Samhain was conceived as.

Now, all I have to do is write more of the damn thing. I've resolved not to keep re-writing what I have, but to press on into virgin territory with every new press of the keyboard. That way the novel grows faster and seems somehow nearer to completion, despite the amount of heavy editing then required, and the sheer bulk of notes required to maintain the integrity of so many new plot details! Writing onwards has a habit of exponentially increasing the amount of revisions required...! But one day it will be done.

Just as a note, Samhain is the Gaelic harvest festival, signalling the end of the year at the coming of winter, which I've used as an emotive descriptor to set an Autumnal tone. It's apparently pronounced "Sow-win".