And here’s what I pasted on the top of what I meant to bold:
Khara enlists the help of her best friend, Aliye, and Aliye’s boyfriend, Helki in attempting to contact the space ship anyway.
The pilot, Nichol, receives the signal and confers with Logor.
I was working on the plot outline for another novel, not Black Light, which I have been working on more or less the last couple of months. As in Black Light is the novel I’ve been working on for the last few months, not the other novel. No, this one is tentatively titled "Placidia" – at least until I come up with a better working title. I was working on the plot outline.
I sometimes write very confused, rabidly confused sentences. I wonder if that’s a sign of how confused my brian is?
Placidia is the first novel I wrote. It’s not done. It needs a fair bit of work. I knew that at the time, but at the time, I didn’t know what to do with it.
Well, let me rephrase. I finished the first draft, and I called it finished because I wrote everything I could think of at the time, but I knew that there were problems with it. I knew it needed serious editing. I knew I’d need to add a bunch more stuff, but at the time? No, I didn’t know what, and I’d had enough of it, and whatever. So I called it done.
Well, I did, after all, write all the major plot points at the time and write it all the way to the end.
The end, as it’s written now, will be scrapped. It’s gonna die a bloody little death. It’s gonna be destroyed. Erased. Deleted. As if it never existed. Battle cry, ho! Existentialists, unite and take over!!!!
Ahem.
Ah, but now we have Fahim and his handy dandy little program he’s writing for me, aka Amanuensis. And that’s making it a lot easier for me to sort out bits and pieces of a novel, sort out plot outline, figure out the order things should happen in, you know. That sort of thing. I’m using Amanuensis for Black Light as well and it’s helped alot – despite the crashes. It’s buggy and Fahim’s taken a break from it so he could let his unconscious figure out what to do to fix it, and he’s got part of it figured out as a result. But not enough that I can work with a bugless program. So I suffer. At the moment.
Meanwhile, and Back at the Ranch, and other meaningless cliches later, I figured that, since I’m nearing completion of Black Light, I figured I needed to work on plotting another novel, and I just decided that it’s time to work on this one again.
I knew way back when that it had plot holes the size of a semi truck and lacked certain other, uh, elements. But you know what? That’s what a first draft of a first novel is for. To learn on. To do everything crappy so you can figure out how to do it better.
Anyway, I plugged Placidia into Amanuensis and I started working on plotting, and this novel is my next one. I’m gonna fix the sucker and fill in all the holes so it reads real nice and everything.
I still don’t know exactly what to fill the holes with. But I guess that’s what brainstorming is all about. Well, and organizing, and sorting, and . . . You got it, baby.
Ack. I’ll figure it out.
The other thing is this. When I get bored of writing one novel, I can switch to writing the other. Fahim? Fahim? Put that down. Fahim. Put that down now. No, no, stop! STOP!!!! DON’T
