Chapter Three is put to bed
Yeah, sorry about that pun. Chapter three of The Sleep of Reason is now completed in first draft. It stands at nearly 10,000 words, but it had so much work to do that I couldn’t see it being any other way.
Actually, I could. There is a pretty sensible breaking point at about the 5,000 word mark, so if I find later that I need shorter chapters, this one will be easy enough to fix. I know I’ll come back to this part of the novel as I write later parts. I’m still in the set-up phase of the story, and later developments may call for earlier attention here.
The next chapter notches up the creepiness factor considerably. As I said in an earlier post, there is nothing supernatural in this novel, but there are plenty of weird, truly unpleasant yet perfectly natural things in our real world, and I intend to present one of those next.
I’ve been so pleased with my synopsis pre-writing approach that I intend to continue it through the novel. I only write these synopses as I need them. I won’t do it for the whole novel but only for each chapter as I approach it. I think this keeps me fresher (in attitude), and maybe I can stay nimble this way as developments suggest themselves. For chapter three I did 2,000 words of pre-writing for a 10,000 word chapter. I think that’s a pretty sensible ratio, especially for how helpful I found it to be.
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