The Right Obsession

Just a random dog I saw today

I don't know whether you can tell, but for the past week or so I've been pretty thoroughly distracted with my current obsession. It's been eating up most of my evenings, wooing me away from other pursuits, delaying my photo editing and blog entries (especially that second Jace entry, sorry), and seeping into other parts of my life. If you've been reading this blog for a while, you'll recognize this as my usual pattern of behavior. The only real competition for my time has come from the need to set up my new computer, which is done now.

The good news is that for once, I'm obsessing about the right thing.

At this moment I'm a third of the way through Chapter 12 of An Adept in Mâvarin, the first volume of Mages of Mâvarin. I'm on page 334. The last chapter of Adept is Chapter 13, and then the narrative rushes on into Another Mâvarin without a break. One of my goals for this rewrite and edit is to give the end of Adept a degree of closure, fostering the illusion that it's a novel rather than only a third of one. The truth, of course, is that An Adept in Mâvarin will never be a completely self-contained story, any more than The Fellowship of the Ring is. I'm okay with that, but even so the book needs to give the impression it's come to a denouement, a narrative lull before the reader is swept into the events of Another Mâvarin.

We'll see how that goes, but in the meantime I'm making definite progress. Aside from formatting (mostly pagination and text styles), I've resolved my dilemma about the two Fayubi-Darsuma scenes (finished off the first but kept it short, and shortened the second one), made Fayubi's grandson a year younger, fixed some continuity glitches and typos, and tightened some prose. I've also been spot-checking my master character list, adding to my glossary of Lopartin spell commands, and tracking place names. The only outstanding issue I have at the moment is a timing question, which will be answered a couple of chapters from now as I get into Another.

John has finished printing Heirs of Mâvarin, but there's been a problem. As I've gone through my chapters of Mages, most of them under 35 doublespaced pages long, I've wondered whether John is right in saying that my chapters of Heirs, averaging 41 pages each, are too long. But I just looked at the two word count files. There are a bunch of longer chapters coming up in the second and third volume of Mages, including a 57-pager as the count stands now. Overall the average is currently 35 pages each. That's not such a big difference, really. So I think the answer is to stop second-guessing myself, and send the first book out!

Karen