Meredith Mansfield, Author

Well, after David Farland’s pep talk last week on “How to Sell Your Novel”, I’ve decided to give BLOOD WILL TELL another try through the traditional channels, after the revisions of course. E-publishing isn’t going away. It will still be there–maybe better and easier–when I’m ready.  (I probably will still stick a toe in those waters with a couple of short stories. We’ll see.)

Revisions on BLOOD WILL TELL continue roughly on schedule, if not as fast as I would really like. Still, all things considered. . .  Yesterday, I finished changing one transition into a scene and well, I don’t think the other quite comes up to the level of a scene, but I at least dug deeper. I wrote one whole new scene and added material to another. Not a bad day’s work.

Those additions are mostly for the purpose of showing earlier exactly what is driving my main character. Not only her main motivations, but her fears and the things that she believes (some of which will turn out not to be true). All good and necessary things.

And as I work on these scenes from the beginning, I’m working out some revelations about my characters. The critiques helped me see some things in a new light. I think I sufficiently tortured my main character, but I may have been a bit too easy on my side characters. The love interest gets tortured for a while, too. But his transformation may be just a bit too easy. And, darn it, it’s a source of conflict which I wasted. Can’t let that happen. They ought to have at least one good argument over it and let him think he’s losing her again, before he finally finds the way to change.

I’m still struggling a bit with the sidekick. I’ve tried to give her a little more rounding in the early chapters, but I don’t know if I’ve succeeded, yet. I’ve got a scene coming up later today (hopefully) that I’m going to recast into her point of view. I actually haven’t had a scene in her point of view yet. That’s something I may have to fix later. She seems weak and fragile, shy and naive to the other characters. So, of course, that’s how the reader sees her, too. To a degree, that’s what I want them to see. But to some readers she was just too useless to live. I have to fix that. This scene should give me a chance to show at least a little interior toughness and resolve.