75% Done with PotH!
With the three-day weekend I was able to squeeze in about five hours of writing time yesterday (luxury!!) and managed to get chapter 14 finished. It was a great chapter to write, too � full of highly emotional scenes and the first love scene of the novel, so I really wanted to take my time with it and do the scenes justice.
Chapter 15 leads us into what I've been thinking of as the pre-climactic scene of the novel, the beginning of the end, the start of the final conflict, so I'm really starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel now (even if the characters have got no idea what's coming at them.) There should only be four or five chapters left at this point, so working hard to make every single one count � maybe I'll actually get this dratted thing finished before the year is out after all, hm? :P
I did a lot of thinking about the crafting of the love scene in this chapter � I think I put more thought into this one than in any that I've written so far, because in this case everything about the scene, the way the characters relate to each other, the positions they choose, the emotional and physical connection that's established between them, are all pivotal to the heart of the story itself. It got me thinking about how, when I wrote love scenes in SotG and Branded Ann, I mostly just wrote them as I "felt" them� I wasn't deliberately trying to infuse the scenes with a deeper meaning, but was just writing what seemed organic to the characters at that point in the story. Still, I think if I were to go back and read through them I could probably find a lot of telling characterization and relationship development in those scenes too. It only makes sense � sex is always a definitive moment between two people, whether the encounter is casual or laden with meaning. Anyway, point being, I think I learned a lot from Kade and Erinda in the last few pages. Can't wait to see this through with them to the end! :)
