Battle scene

Just managed to squeeze in an hour's writing this morning, after staying up half the night drawing up design concepts for the day job. The writing was mostly editing, actually. Not something I encourage in first draft but with the deadline looming I figure it's worth breaking the rules.

The editing was partly to fix a classic problem, namely straying too far outside the 'tight third person' POV of the narrative. This is a single-viewpoint novel, which means everything is narrated from the main character's perspective. Now, when you're writing a big battle scene (and yes, this one's a lot bigger than the big one I wrote earlier) it's easy to slip out of that mode and get too authorial. The literary equivalent of sticking a wide angle lens on the camera, if you like.

So I've rewritten with a view to zooming in a bit, made sure everything's described from the point of view of our hero, not by an author with a god's-eye view.

At the same time, I killed off someone I wasn't expecting to kill off. It's a character who played a very minor role in the outline I was given to work from (this is a ghost-writing project remember). Throughout the MS I've elevated him to play more of a part in the story than originally intended, for various reasons. And suddenly, in the middle of the battle, it seemed the most natural thing in the world to ice him. Sorry, old chap, but you just had to go.

For the record, word count is now around 74,500. Anticipated chapter count still a little fluid - the battle took longer than expected, for instance. But the story's shaping well, so who needs stats?

Time to change hats again, put the MS down and take last night's drawings into work. Next chapter: the Big Confrontation (insert musical sting of your choice).