Started in...

Going through APoS for the umpteenth time with a red pen to cut back on the non-stop chatter and finding it's harder than I thought it'd be. I've gone through the opening and first chapter, setting up the time, situation, and Brendan's family...but he insists on still meandering about somewhat in his memories. Guess the structure is going to remain a linear/non-linear style, as if he is telling it to someone, verbally, and thinking of moments to add as he goes along.

I have removed a fair amount of repetition and him being too aware of what people really are like. I'm still having a tug of war over the idea that Brendan's Da never told his kids the stories he tells in the pubs while caging drinks off the patrons. That doesn't really make sense but at the same time it almost does, if he only wants to use those stories and songs he sings in order to get drunk.

I still haven't worked out why he's a brute of an alcoholic. I know it can be part of a person's DNA, to have an addictive personality, but I keep getting the feeling he wants to have a reason and to be understood. I have notes about him killing a priest who molested him as a child in an orphanage...but that's simplistic and too on the nose.

It also has to work in with why Ma is so tight and protective of him, even though he's beaten her. That can't be simply battered woman syndrome or a masochistic need to be punished. Those are too easy and don't explain her obvious love for him. Brendan catches on that it's a form of sickness between the two, sort of a can't-live-with-'em-can't-live-without-'em connection. But she also works at elevating her dead husband to a martyr's level, and that denotes something more deeply entrenched in her about him.

Love is not always merely love.