Friday, February 23, 2007

Kidney Stone Update (The Last, I Hope)

Written by Kodi Wolf at 10:56 AM

According to my latest CT scan, I've apparently passed the left kidney stone, though I never noticed it, thankfully. I still have the one in my right kidney, but the urologist said it's pretty tiny, so it shouldn't cause me any problems for the time being.

In other news, I've been working on The Vampire Hunter a lot the past couple weeks. I've rewritten the beginning again, but I think I finally have it the way I want it now, so I've moved on to the next set of chapters.

Unfortunately, I'm feeling a little stuck. I realized with one of the new chapters that I basically introduce eight new characters in the space of three pages, which is a lot to expect a reader to keep track of and with very little detail (it's mostly conversation). So, I think I need to expand the scene by adding several precursor scenes, so that I can introduce a few characters at a time in smaller chunks before I get to the main scene.

Of course, there's always the option of cutting the scene entirely and letting the characters be introduced when they were in the earlier draft, but I think the new scene makes Blake a lot less two-dimensional (originally, he's bad because I say he's bad, rather than showing why Gabrielle has decided to move against him and the others). It also brings Michelle, Shiri, and David into the story sooner, which I like. I'm thinking whatever I do, I want it to show the dynamics of the group: who hangs with who, that sort of thing. Now, if I could just figure out how to write it and make it pertinent to the story...