More Changes

I know, I seem to be talking about nothing but my novel, lately, and with good cause. Ever since I lost my job, working on my crime story has been my new day job and I sit at the same desk over the same daytime hours as I did when I was working from home.

I just don't get paid to be here.

Putting in close to 40 hours each week writing Dark Water is what allowed me to finish the first draft in such a short period of time. And, unlike my old job, this book has given me a great deal of joy. I had a lot of fun putting the story together.

(I was really good at my old job but to say I had fun or that it gave me joy is a stretch. It paid the bills and allowed me to enjoy the rest of my life.)

I'm now at a point in the writing process where I've started reading my book and making corrections to the grammar, spelling, and other errors. In reading just the first two paragraphs of the prologue, I realized that I had left out something from the epilogue, and used that morning to add the new content. I then started from be beginning and read through the story.

By the end, I had cut some material, added new material, and corrected existing material. I also made notes of things that I needed to research more and made sure I had followed all of the clues that the detectives discovered.

And, after reading, I walked away from the book for the weekend.

As I wrote, a couple of days ago, I made some changes to one of the detectives, Erin Hayes. Using an advanced AI search engine, I was able to make her more believable, even if that meant she was knocked down in rank.

At the beginning of this week, I started reading Dark Water a second time, and by the second chapter, I decided to make a major structural change. And this change took me the entire day.

When I started writing the outline, I wanted to structure the book so that each chapter was an entire day, with the exception of the prologue, which spans two days (it's short), and the first and second chapters, which were one day but from the perspective of different people.

The problem with keeping one day per chapter was that the chapters became very long. Some were as many as 60 8.5 x 11 pages, which translated into 80 paperback pages or more. I used asterisks (*) to denote scene breaks, hoping they would make it easy on a reader, but I decided that I need to give up my one-chapter-per-day structure.

So I went through each chapter and broke it up where I thought the scene change warranted a new chapter. Some chapters are as long as 14 pages while a few are as short as one or two pages. After I restructured the book, I've ended up with 58 chapters, a prologue, and an epilogue.

I'm hoping that it is now easier to read: I'm currently going through my first reading with this new structure so I hope I made the right decision.

When I demoted Erin Hayes, I made her a Detective Sergeant, which is still a fast track for someone her age, but I thought I'd need to create a backstory that explains her rise in the ranks. This involved me creating another crime story, which actually came pretty quickly, though I find the crime-fiction genre to be my calling (more on that, tomorrow).

Without giving too much away, Hayes is known as the Detective Constable who cracked the Jackpot Kidnappings case, which had reached international recognition. By the time she is promoted and transferred to the Ottawa Police Services, Mickey Calloway had heard of the Jackpot Kidnappings.

While I was brainstorming for Hayes' backstory, I took a look at the image that I had AI generate, a few months ago, of our two detectives. I had already generated a new image of Hayes, alone, which I used for my blog post about her demotion. It's perfect in its depiction of my "ridiculously beautiful" detective and I won't be generating any more.

The new Calloway (Perplexity)

But I've always thought that the AI image of Calloway was too 'Hollywood' in its portrayal of my lead male detective. Calloway is huge (two metres tall and broad) and has an imposing look about him, but he can be as gentle as he is tough.

I wanted to create a less-perfect image of him, so after attaching the old picture of Hayes and Calloway into Perplexity, I asked the AI tool to make him less 'TV-ready' and to give him a more human appearance.

The image gives him a softer, more rounded face, though I believe that when he wants to look intimidating, he can. The new image also has him appear like he would be a good dad, and that's how I've written Calloway.

So this picture is also a keeper.

Someone asked me, in an earlier Comments section, if I would not use a human graphics artist for my book cover, and they are right. When Dark Water is eventually published, I will seek out a graphic designer (or the publishing company will).

When I had Songsaengnim: A Korea Diary published, the publishers offered a few cover designs from which I could choose. I assumed they had a few stock covers and suggested the most suitable ones for me to inspect. I chose the cover it ended up getting.

I've created these AI images to use as ideas for a cover, and I would show them to the graphics designer as a template. In the meantime, I've created them to use in my blog posts. They were never intended as a final book cover.

I continue to go through the manuscript and make changes as needed. I'm still several weeks away from submitting it to an editor, so there's lots of work ahead of me.

I hope you're not bothered by me sharing my thought process and status of the book. In fact, I hope that I'm building anticipation, so that when Dark Water is finally published, you'll be interested enough to want to buy a copy.

Happy Thursday!