I ask because I don’t really know for sure. I’ve completed and polished several pivotal scenes from The Grey Lord, and I love how they’ve come out. I’ve added an important new character, removed a second, and re-relegated (sic) a third character I’d temporarily promoted to top-tier status to a position back amongst the strong supporting cast. Erik’s story has finally attained the crystal clarity that Anhak’s and Färus’s stories had already managed, and has in fact surpassed them in several ways.
Unfortunately, all this clarity has come at a steep price: my detailed outline is now officially screwed. I’m going to need to re-think the entire story structure with all of these revelations and changes. It’s not that the stories are changing catastrophically, but the way they interplay is definitely changing, and if I’m going to successfully weave them together the way I did in the first book I’m going to need to pull back and stare at the stories for a bit before I can move ahead.
The delay isn’t all a bad thing. There were definitely parts of the outline that were weaker than I wanted them to be, and with the new characters firmly in place it lets me create some compelling scenes between characters that otherwise would not have interacted, or who would have interacted in a much less interesting capacity. But it definitely requires a halt to forward momentum and a regroup as I work out how the new stuff changes the way the story gets told.
So yeah, I guess all told it’s progress. It just seems a bit counterintuitive to call it progress when it involves stopping and staring and cribbing notes instead of writing new chapters.
