More notes made. A bit of revision to smooth some additions over. Now it's time to go through and input all the changes in the Word file. See what I've got going here. Make it fit and be a smooth read, which is why I go over and over and over my work. I'm not like Stephen King; I don't have his command of language, never have. He spits 'em out like a human branch of AI.
I used to think I was smart. The way some of my books fell together gave me a hint of arrogance, a bit too much certainty that I know what I'm doing. I just neglected to keep in mind that those were jaunty things with sex and violence in them, and weren't too solidly grounded in reality. My hardest one, Bobby Carapisi, took a fair amount of effort to make right, but that was because the characters took me places I didn't want to go and I fought them.
But with A Place of Safety, I'm dealing not only with a real time and actual places and events that truly occurred, I'm dealing with making sure the characters ring true for how they would have lived their lives. And dealing with a couple people already having told me I will never be able to make it right. So I've worked it and worked it and worked it and am now at the point where I can accept that if it's good enough for someone in LA or NYC or even London to read it and feel it's true, that's the best I can do.
I won't be able to not read what people say about it, if it gets any reviews. That's a compulsion with me. But it's also how I see what works and what doesn't. Like with The Beast in the Nothing Room. The reviews are pretty good for it, but one comment caught me and I could see where I'd made a mistake; I didn't set the relationship between Finn and Christian up well enough to honestly earn the ending. Didn't make that mistake in the books after.
So on this story, I'm dancing as fast as Tom Hiddleston...just nowhere near as hot...
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