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I don't know what happened. I think that one of the long pieces was missing from the master document -- it certainly was just now when I was nosing around to check continuity and correct the timetable -- but Afterwar, with two chunks left to complete, is at 87679 words, which is well inside my comfort zone. Previously I thought I was going to be lucky to come in at 70K, which is the bottom of my comfort zone for this kind of book. I don't want it to be much longer than 90=92K, though, because it does some wonky things with the timeline and I think it's a burden to read wonky books that are very long.
I have never written anything so out of order and jumping around in my life. I have gone back and changed things radically, or added and subtracted things, but this book is entirely crazy-quilt in process. This is true of the chronological order as well as the process order, and the one might be the cause of the other. At first I thought I was doing two straight linear timelines, one in Pablo and Resi's childhoods and one in their adulthoods, but at some point last year it hit me that I wanted the three longer pieces, the adult ones, to go A-C-B instead of A-B-C. A being the segment in which the two men meet as adults, B the segment in which they more or less become friends and also meet the women they'll spend their lives with, and C being the segment in which they are both involved in a labor dispute,and both of them take unaccustomed risks to resolve it. I just thought that the B segment was more like a conclusion.
And now I have a segment at the end (which was originally the last one of the early timeline and the first time the two men meet in the flesh, though they don't know it, and I hope I'm not bludgeoning the reader too much with this) which takes place before A and which joins the two timelines together.
The early timeline does proceed in a linear, chronological fashion, in a series of much shorter segments, the last of which takes place only months before the new last segment. In a way, I guess, this ties the story together better, and explains how they came out the way they did.
I have never written anything so out of order and jumping around in my life. I have gone back and changed things radically, or added and subtracted things, but this book is entirely crazy-quilt in process. This is true of the chronological order as well as the process order, and the one might be the cause of the other. At first I thought I was doing two straight linear timelines, one in Pablo and Resi's childhoods and one in their adulthoods, but at some point last year it hit me that I wanted the three longer pieces, the adult ones, to go A-C-B instead of A-B-C. A being the segment in which the two men meet as adults, B the segment in which they more or less become friends and also meet the women they'll spend their lives with, and C being the segment in which they are both involved in a labor dispute,and both of them take unaccustomed risks to resolve it. I just thought that the B segment was more like a conclusion.
And now I have a segment at the end (which was originally the last one of the early timeline and the first time the two men meet in the flesh, though they don't know it, and I hope I'm not bludgeoning the reader too much with this) which takes place before A and which joins the two timelines together.
The early timeline does proceed in a linear, chronological fashion, in a series of much shorter segments, the last of which takes place only months before the new last segment. In a way, I guess, this ties the story together better, and explains how they came out the way they did.
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