Spacing Out The Revelations: Preparatory Work

Well, I have now whiled away much of today's writing time setting up this blog, but I'm excited to have it, so I think it was worthwhile time spent. I have not done much revising in the past week since I returned from New York, instead spending my days unpacking, doing laundry, and catching up on e-mail and correspondence after all the itineracy I have engaged in during the past month and a half, and my evenings spending time with some of my good friends in the area, who I have missed while I have been away.

But today I did actually get into the novel for a bit before I get swept up and away in the idea for this blog. So here's what I was doing. Basically, I was continuing the process I began just before I left for New York, which consisted of making a list of all of the events in the novel, and a list of all of the revelations that need to occur sometime before the end of the book. The problem is that a large number of these revelations currently occur in a single explanatory monologue the villainess delivers to the protagonist towards the very end of the novel, and that just doesn't seem to be the done thing these days, unless you're Ayn Rand, you know? So I need to find a way to intersperse those amongst the action, I suppose... In preparation for doing that, I am making the aforementioned lists, so that I can choose a point in the plot at which each of the revelations will occur, so that they will be spaced out throughout the novel instead of clustered together in a single expository speech at the very end. Fun stuff!

I also started going through the first draft and converting it into a chart, with plot developments justified to the left margin and revelations justified to the right, which was a helpful but very detailed and time-consuming process which I'm not sure I'll complete at this point. But it was an interesting exercise, and may come in handy sometime later...