Peeking into the rock

Well, it came to me in something sort of like a dream: for some reason I was re-inventing "The Little Princess" in my sleep, only the child in question was a boy, and the whole scene was somewhat less fevered. (well, that is, lacking the weird "princess" ideology) And then later I realized it all sort of made sense if the fellow was abandoned by fate at the cadet school attended by the Little-Duke Sasha and eventually took Yanek's place in Sasha's affections and personnel planning.

Okay, that doesn't make any sense to anybody but me, and I doubt it will actually show in anything I'm writing but it might inform how I portray Sasha when he comes back into the story (Real Soon Now: yesterday I got my guy into the prisoner of war camp, and today I'm getting him into the hands of the "enemy" lieutenant. This last part should go a lot faster than the first part and the middle part)

On a related front, I had over 130K words halfway through the last chapter I wrote. I can bring the draft in under 175K, I'm pretty sure, but that seems too long for this story. But I have no idea how to trim as much as I think ought to be trimmed, so that's a task for revision. There is a pattern I notice anyway, though I don't know whether it helps to have noticed it. The chapters are getting longer on average as the book goes on, but the (unofficial) sections are getting shorter.  So it took nineteenchapters to get from the beginning to the copnscription, and five chapters to get him from conscription to capture. And probably what? four chapters? to get to this point I'm going to be coy about where Yanek gets to act as a grown man and full citizen, and two? to mop things up. Probably most of the cutting will happen in the front then? But I don't wanna.

I hate it when I write really long things.

edit: I really need to make music notes so I know what to search for when I want to find these things again.

today: Khusugtun


also: Bayan Mix