Settling down

Took the day off from worrying about APoS-NWFO and did very little on social media. Instead, I'm reading Adrian McKinty's final Sean Duffy murder mystery, The Detective Up Late. I've read all the others--as well as Gerard Brenna's and Stuart Neville's works--mainly to get a feel for the syntax of Northern Ireland...only to find they're all set in Belfast, not Derry. That's like using the way people in San Antonio talk as opposed to Dallas. Not severe differences, but enough to matter.

The one real positive is Duffy is originally from Derry; he's just a Catholic cop in a hateful Protestant-riven Constabulary. AKA: peelers...RUC...the usual stupid people who think they're either smart or too butch to care.

I'm going to adjust the font and sizing, tomorrow, and print out a hardcopy to start going over in red pen. Make sure the changes I input in draft 7 work well enough...as well as check for typos, missing words and inconsistencies. Then send it off to be properly proofed and edited.

I'm liking the changes I made in this draft. It's funny, but putting Brendan back in the attic room for the last quarter of the book actually worked out better than him returning to the pool house. Maybe I'm paying attention to him enough to make this work, now.

Home Not Home is next. Of course, it needs a LOT of work, even though it's in 3rd draft. I have a section I need to add where Brendan learns his father was recorded by a college student while telling one of his stories in a pub and he goes to listen to it...and it's beautifully told. It was caught at just the right moment, before Da was too drunk to keep his thoughts in order.

He gets a copy and shares it with Eamonn, who's locked away in the H-Blocks. And despite him pretending to be someone else, the two brothers reconnect so that later, when it's suggested Eamonn add his name to the list of hunger strikers, Brendan has more cause to turn brutal to keep it from happening.

It's all leading to an ending that I'm not crazy about, but is necessary. Dammit.