Double, Double, Toil and Trouble

 One Last Quest is getting questier. I'm still working to keep the shape of the story the same, staying with the original beats but mixing in new motivations, new richness, and new dumb jokes. At its core, this was always a book that amused me to write. I'm still amused by it, though I'm also shocked at the number of typos present, the weird sentence structure, and the plot gaps. To my eyes now, it reads like a first draft that tried.

I'm around 75% through the initial re-read and injection pass, and the book has expanded from around 60K to over 100K in wordcount. I think the skeleton is still strong, and I know I've hung some flabbiness from it, but it's still a shock that I've almost doubled the original "finished" work, just by layering in more.

I think this is a good lesson for anyone, especially those looking at their finished work and realizing that their aspirations will require another 20-40K at least to meet some wordcount goal. All those new words don't need to be done as whole chapters, but can be injected here and there, like chocolate chips stirred in later. (I'm craving cookies right now.) Expansion doesn't mean "complete rewrite" or "layer in prose" but might mean finding flat sections and giving them a bit of inflation.

Early parts of OLQ felt flat to me on this reread. I remember writing towards the goal, the conclusion, the process of finding the story as I went from the shambles of my pseudo-outline. Now with more time, I can see the overall structure, and with better tools, I can do better assessments. My habits of gerunding, and boring adjectives, and over-dependency on adverbs are glaring now. I'm eager to sit back and take a look at the whole structure of the piece, see how it can be organized and balanced more like a meal than a light appetizer followed by a heavy dessert.

It's a lot of work, and I've made a lot of trouble for myself, but I'm still having fun with this silly little book, and isn't fun what we're supposed to be having?

🧩🦏 

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