Before I dig in, let’s take a look at this beauty:

That be the map for Chancers (by the patient and kindly Ti Munro over at Feed the Multiverse), which is still slated for a crowdfunding launch this summer. If you’d like to hop on this train, your ticket to ride is right over here.

While I’m here, let me remind you that learning is terrible. Having learned is fantastic, and makes one feel like some sort of wizard, but the process is all about confronting discomfort, ignorance, and difference and coming out the better for it. Which is at least tricksy and is often brutal. It is, of course, critically necessary stuff, and often unavoidable. And in many cases it takes a few extra errors to determine that something was not, in fact, originally an error.

Lately, for instance, I’ve been revising a novella. More news on that before long. While I hope to turn the revision around quickly and get it back into the hands of a publisher, I had to wrangle with a snag: an early reader felt that my protagonist took a little too long to get on with the business of telling their story, as he lays out the causes of his reluctance to do the telling exhaustively. It took me about four variations on condensation to determine that the original hemming and hawing was probably just the right amount. He’s presented as an inexperienced storyteller dealing with slippery personal stuff, so it seems fitting to me that he’s going to dawdle a little before getting underway. I also happen to think his dawdling is engaging, and it speaks a great deal to the place he’s writing from. So in the midst of all my concessions to the wisdom of that early reader, I have tried to explain why I stuck to my guns.

I am, as it turns out, exceedingly sensitive to wasting time. When I write out hypnosis scripts, for instance, I am terribly reluctant to commit all the preliminaries to print, even though they’re critical. The needfuls generally come in during my last drafts. But I should also acknowledge my intolerance for reading and/or watching too much of a bad thing. Even after all these years I can’t handle Miss Bates in Emma all that well (the overly talkative character with little to say will always be one of my bêtes noire), and while screening The Residence this past week I bristled at The Drunk Who Keeps Changing Their Story, a comedic type that belongs to the roster of liars in most detective fiction but is always hard to read or watch. Detective fiction presupposes some level of competence in the culprit most of the time, so when a story establishes that a character was discernibly drunk for most of the night when the crime went down, it’s hard to take the candidacy of that problem type seriously.

So part of me feels like I spent more time than necessary on those trial revisions, but at day’s end having a bit of evidence to suggest my narrator’s dawdling was sufficient but not excessive is a valuable thing. And the more mature parts of my brain understand that efforts to minimize errors of excess in the first draft tends to bog down the writing process and makes the prose much stiffer. That stiffness, too, is remediable, but it’s a hindrance in the first draft that also requires extra time spent in revision, a lose-lose proposition.

That’s where we’re at today, at any rate. With luck I’ll be able to put another chapter in the Completed Drafts folder for Chancers today, so it’s time to point my forehead in that direction before the deluge of grading arrives to end the spring semester.