Some links may be affiliate links. I may earn money if you buy something or take an action after clicking one of these links on this site.
Rob Knowlan is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.
Essential Toils
We’re still in the Red Zone, thanks to the tyrannical dictates of our governor. Be that as it may, we had some errands to run.
Shopping & Dropping
It’s been said that sunlight and heat will help to put an end to COVID19, or at least the first round of it. Given the summer-like forecast for the weekend and all the people who were out in tank tops and stretch pants to give evidence of its accuracy, you’d think we were well on our way.
Unfortunately, our power-mad governor has not only extended the timeframe but he has also issued serious threats against any counties or communities who open on their own authority. Problem (for him) is that we already have the authority and he has none. Our constitutional rights are being violated and it’s getting rather old.
He’s not the only one. Governors throughout the country have been issuing illegal restrictions and helping Congressional Democrats to attempt to decimate the economy. It’s absolutely disgraceful and I look forward to a Summer of really busy lawyers. If there aren’t a slew of lawsuits being filed for the deliberate harm being done to people’s rights and livelihoods, I’ll be unpleasantly surprised.
Frankly, I’d love to see Tom Wolf sued out of office. It might seem like wishful thinking to some but the more he continues to drag this out, the more likely it becomes
Legendary
With Great Power: The Stan Lee Story
I watched this documentary about the late, great Stan Lee. He was a key figure in the survival and development of comic books as a genre of popular mythology.
Stan took the characters out of two dimensions and made them believable by starting with the people who had the powers. By considering the lives of people who had these spectacular transformations, Stan and his creative partners brought some of the most popular and enduring characters to life in such a way that they are still household names.
No Accounting For Haste
Silence is the sleep that nourishes wisdom. ~Francis Bacon
It’s been my habit in recent weeks to list my daily word counts on Facebook. My current efforts have brought me to 102,667 words in the document.
My daily target is about 3,000 words. I’ve been off and on as far as that goes. Sometimes the words come freely and other times, it is considerably more arduous.
I’ve spoken already about some of the qualms I have about the pacing of my book. I’ve been listening to it nightly to look for places where the story might be dragging. I even got my beloved wife to listen to it while we traveled today. She said it’s flowing nicely.
That being said, I feel that there are some places that get repetitive. In real life, stories of events spread around and are discussed by various people. Superhero events would certainly be worthy of discussion among themselves, family, friends and fans.
Another benefit of having any given event discussed among characters who were not directly related is to provide alternative points of view. Whether it gives you another perspective on the event itself or whether it reveals something about the person reacting to the event, what seems like rehashing the same event over and over helps tie all of the characters together around the common event as well as providing all of these different opinions about it.
The first Sentinels book takes place in the middle of the Summer of 2005, so there are no school appearances such as the one that got Tanda interested in becoming a superhero in the first place. Also, since she managed to wind up in the hospital from the outset, they’re not going to be called up for as many TacDiv missions.
The problem with the First-Person Limited approach, as I have mentioned before, is that a lot happens in a small amount of time. It takes several chapters to get through any given day of their time because of the different characters. I’m shooting for about 1,200 words per chapter to keep them long enough to accomplish something but short enough not to get locked up in any one character’s head for too long.
Since I have borrowed the habit of naming the chapters after the POV characters from George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice & Fire, it would seem that I have assumed his capacity for having ponderous tomes with zillions of chapters and dozens of POV characters. Of course, George was already a fairly well-established author when Game of Thrones first came out.
I’m not sure if that gave him license to write astoundingly long books, but it certainly found an audience. As for me, in this time, that may not be the way to create a fan base. People, generally, have a shockingly short attention span. I’m not sure if they would be willing to take a risk on a self-published author with Martinesque page counts.
Either way, I’ve still got editing to do in order to find the correct place to finish the first book. I’ve got an idea of where I want that to happen and what ground I need to cover in order to get there. The problem rests in the matter of stitching in some of the bad guys’ goings-on and not rushing to the climax. Pacing is as problematic as ever.
We got out and back without a great deal of travail. Some of the lines were intolerable, but we got most of what we went for. The state of some of our favorite stores is disquieting, but more on that another time.