chapter two

[ritaxis]

I just saved chapter two. The hard thing about going from 1st to 3rd is that the protagonist doesn't have a name yet. In first that's not a problem, it's just "I." In third you have to make it clear who you're talking about some other way: unless the protagonist is the only one in the story of its gender, it gets no unique pronoun,so it needs a unique name. To make matters worse, the protagonist has the quality of answering to whatever name you think he has. So it's misleading to refer to him by the names that the other characters are using for him (in the first two chapters he's been George, Sonny, and Pedro. It will get worse before it gets better). I am not at all happy with the solution I've embraced at the moment: the narrative refers to him as the Interface. I might be happier with a lower-case letter on that, since it's not a title of office but a regular noun like "typewriter." He being, at first, an object.

Other than that, the chapters are getting a couple-three hundred words longer, but there may end up being fewer of them as I front-load some of the material that originally never showed up until much later.

On another front, Malouma has an even better voice.