Biog - progress report, December 2006

Well, I have finished the first draft of the third volume... at last... This is the culmination of more than 4 years of work. It is, in truth, the completion, if not of the book, at least of the story and that has been so many years in the writing that I'm not going to scare myself by calculating how long *grin*

Finishing this involved, as usual, far more work than I had anticipated. The last three chapters I've written are, respectively, 29, 30 and 31 pages (hard back edition) long. If you consider that the average chapter length in the previous two volumes was 16 pages... and even in the 3rd volume, 22 pages... you can perhaps get an idea of what I have been up against. Not that I'm complaining, these last few chapters have been a rollercoaster ride and very fulfilling. It was strange at last to reach key scenes that I planned 14 or more years ago and to actually see and feel them through my characters. Even though I knew where things were going, this has been perhaps the part of the Stone Dance that most surprised me...

So, it seems the 3rd volume when finished will be around 310,000 words. My insistence on keeping it to 32 chapters is beginning to feel restrictive. Also, I'm concerned that, at their current length, some of them are simply too long... and so, I suspect the 3rd volume might fall into a more natural and comfortable 40 chapters or so. We shall see...

I am much relieved that I have managed to reach this milestone before Christmas... tomorrow my extended family begin to descend on my house... for I have rashly decided to make them all Christmas dinner *grin* If I surive that, I am off for a break: a few weeks in Cambodia. Though I am sure that much about the country and its people will be to me a revelation, I will admit that my goal is Angkor Wat... a place I have admired from afar since I was a child... For me it really is a sort of pilgrimage. This just seems to be the right time to go there... No doubt it will imbue the finished book with some of its magic.

When I return, I will be plunging straight into the rewrites. I'm not entirely sure what to expect of this process. I think I've mentioned elsewhere that I've written each of the Stone Dance volumes in a different way. So, previous experience doesn't really help me judge what the process is going to be like. What I do know is that rewriting is a very different task from writing a first draft. For one thing, working with extant text is far less daunting than sitting down each morning to confront yet another blank page: making something out of nothing sometimes feels as if I'm pulling it physically out of my guts. Reshaping text that already exists, joining parts that are broken, clearing all the channels to allow the life of the story to flow smoothly and with vigour - that is altogether a much more humane occupation. Time will pass far more rapidly for me and within the story itself. Writing a first draft, it is as if I am painting the cells of a film, one at a time. The rewrites begin to cause the frames to follow one another fast enough that I can see the whole thing animating. By the time I am making my 4th or 5th pass, the whole procedure will take not more than 2 - 3 weeks on my side, and the story will be running as smoothly in my mind as it will, I hope, in yours...

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