… is my daily grind. I’m laboring somewhere in the middle of the middle book, writing and rewriting the same chapter. It’s new, recently inserted. Zebe, seeking revenge for her twin sister’s misfortune, needs more time than the main plot can spare to put her conspiracy into place. Hence, her own POV chapter.

But will she/won’t she achieve her goal? I’m finding that the original problem will not go away. Zebe’s sub-plot is too strenuous and intricate in its early stages to seamlessly be integrated into the main plot immediately before its stated take-off.

All it needs, you will be saying, is for the one plot-line to be stretched and the other to be shrunk until there is integration. That’s a paper and pencil task. I’ll keep you posted.

My second concern is that Meld is far stranger than Mongrel. A large party of alien ladies must be accommodated in Meld–Tardi Malko, protagonist extraordinaire, is the one in the picture to carry them–at the same time that he lives his life?

Because, while the alien ladies impinge on TM’s life big time, there are other things going on in it. How to do them justice, I’m wondering.

Then I wonder whether I’m being too optimistic? That I’m trying to stuff too much into the novel? I’ve already moved the end of Meld to the beginning of Part 3, Morph, where it might work better.

I feel like I’m having to learn to write again. My normal prose seems not strong enough to carry the weight of meaning the characters in this book will need to carry. So far this weekend, I’ve been re-reading How-To books such as Writing 21st Century Fiction by Donald Maass.