That's Evolution Baby

Argh... Story Evolutions are hard work. Which would be fine, if my brain weren't so mired in drowsiness I could pull together a coherent thought, but such is not the case. Once again I am battling the inertia that wants to pull me back into bed. I still managed to convince myself to get up this morning at my regular time, but only with the proviso that come tomorrow morning I could sleep in as late as I wanted. I'm already counting the hours.

I'm thinking Nikki might be right - I'm in serious need of some iron and the best way to get that is by a fast injection of red meat into my diet. Which I haven't actually had in a couple weeks which might explain things. I'm supposed to eat a regular supply to keep my iron up and lately I've fallen off the wagon. I see a big slower cooker full of chili in my near future. Or better yet, perhaps I can convince my red meat resistent sister to rustle up a burger for me at the camp.

Meanwhile, back to the story evolution. I finished the scene capsules for Outlaw Bride and started in on the story evolution this morning. I find the beginning section of this the hardest. Once I get that out of the way it's usually smooth sailing but for some reason trying to figure out what goes in the beginning is a bit difficult, and I have no idea why. I've already written the book, I know what happens, but trying to find the cut off between beginning and middle seems to stump me for some reason. Especially this morning. I satt there struggling and then remember 'oh yeah FD30 said it was usually the first 50 pages of the manuscript'. Well, duh. So I open the manuscript and go to page 50, see where that takes me and it all becomes clear. Well clear-er anyway.

Now I am in the process of detailing the beginning quests to the story goal and all that fun stuff. That's about as far as I got this morning before I ran out of steam. Not too bad though. I have a 4 day weekend, two days of which will be at the camp, but I plan on spending a few hours tomorrow and all of Monday morning working to finish up the story evolution. Once I have that done, the scene cutting in the manuscript will begin in earnest. I used to dread the idea of cutting anything out of my stories, but that doesn't seem to bother me anymore. I become quite mercenary at slicing and dicing now. Maybe because I have to do it so often since I'm always overshooting my page count in a big way.

Other plans for the weekend include hopefully finishing Caleb Carr's, Angel of Darkness while I'm down at the camp. My choice of reads seems to be taking a bit of a turn lately. I'm moving away from historical romance a bit and into more historical mainstream fiction, as well as some horror and some fantasy of the Anne Bishop variety. I've even picked up some interesting young adult fiction.

I think I just needed a bit of a change. I've been reading a steady diet of nothing but historical romance for over a year now. Much as I love them, I need something different to keep things fresh. Plus it seems to be getting harder and harder to find historical romance with a darker element to it. Many of the publishers seem to be feeding us a one course meal of romance light. Which is fine, if you also have the choice of mixing it with the dark. I like a dark read. I've already discussed my penchant for the dark underbellies of things, a fact that I think will see my writing eventually evolve into historical mainstream with strong romantic elements unless the historical romance market changes to accommodate the former. We'll see.

For now, I'm just going to write and see what comes out. I'll worry about where to sell it afterwards. First I've got to get the story down.