Or at least the first draft of Road Trip! is finished. It clocked in at almost 19,000 words with 17 chapters, so my goal of roughly 1.2K a chapter wasn't all that bad an estimate. Parts of it suffered from trying to make them like the short story sections and I'll need to redo some bits and make it overall more cohesive but it wasn't a bad experiment at all.
It does, however, make not using the magician's name difficult. So I'll probably get it out of the way relatively quickly in the novel (I might have his sister use it first). It does highlight that the largely present-tense first person style I use for most of the stories won't work for an entire novel, but I pretty much knew that already. I think I'll go with first person for the novel, mostly using the magician as the POV character though I do plan to switch over to Charlie at some points.
Other plus sides: I figured out wth is up with Jay, which is important. I need to work on what being a god-eater means/does a little more, though now Charlie is aware that the magician is deliberately steering her away from gods. Though not why. The tug-of-war between adventure, travel and trust between them is a huge part of the series though I think the novel will end with Charlie heading off to do her own thing for a time. It also removes a crutch the magician can lean on to avoid doing things that need to be done, which will be handy down the road.
Now to work on plot ideas for the novel ....
Why do you think that present-tense 1st person doesn't work? My 'Shotgun' story is in that form, and I didn't find the need to give my character a name either ;)
ReplyDeleteYeah! to more Jay! (sorry, I now that rhymes, I am very tired at the moment :p)
I think it's partially because the magician plans a more directly active (gung-ho) role than N did in your story, so it becomes stylistically awkward to not have people say his name in introductions, when meeting his own family and so forth. I also don't think the story gains anything from his name not being known, though I have plans for it to be used sparingly anyway -- it helped the short stories to use 'the magician' and the like, but I don't think that will benefit the novel.
DeleteFrom a more pragmatic pov, present tense doesn't benefit genre fiction as much as it does YA (it comes off more like reading a movie script, to me), and works better for action-driven stories in the genre context. The story will probably be odd enough without also asking the reader to shift into reading present tense. Shall see. Also, I'm going to shift povs between the magician and Charlie a few times and doing that in first person past is easier than present; and also calls into question the need for present tense at all.
So the choice is as much practical as anything else, I think.