salvatorefalco.com

I am not making anything like the kind of progress I’d hoped for on NHI. I’ve put about 20 hours of work into it and don’t have more than the sketchiest idea of the plot. At 20 hours, I’d planned to have at least a short plot synopsis complete from which to start building the outline, but I don’t have that. I’d also hoped to have put in somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 hours by now.

Jury duty threw my schedule off some, which robbed me of about ten hours. The other missing ten are due to work on a couple of short stories, so I’m not terribly upset about being behind schedule in that way. What does bother me is that I wasted a lot of last week’s effort, which puts me behind where I should be for the amount of time I have spent.

Last week, for reasons not quite clear to me in retrospect, I decided to promote the supporting viewpoint character to protagonist and remove entirely the original protagonist. I spent most of the week revising the background for my new protagonist. When I got done, I realized that I’d made a terrible mistake.

My original protagonist was what made the story fresh and unique. Switching protagonists turned the novel into just another police procedural. Better, I guess, to have realized that before I got deep into the first draft. Still, I’m irritated that I didn’t think the switch through more carefully in the first place.