Time is not on my side

I wrote the second act of Hero Factor according to what Jane Espenson refers to as the Love Boat method–that is, I wrote all of the scenes for one plot thread, then doubled back to write the scenes for a separate-but-equal plot thread. These two threads eventually merge into one, so at some point their timelines must coincide. I can already tell that this isn’t happening. I forced the first one to cover a certain number of days, because that’s how long I thought the other would cover, but it turns out the characters in the current thread are much more efficient at getting to the point and wrapping things up than I thought they’d be.

I’m not worrying about it now. In the editing stage I’ll worry about how to make them match up properly. But this is something you might want to be aware of if you write out of order like I did. This was a big issue back on that one multi-author fanfic I worked on that one time, trying to figure out exactly when different things were happening in the story. The up side of that was that there were many pairs of eyes who could catch if the moon was full in one scene and waning in the next. Until I get to the beta stage, I only have my own two eyes to catch these things. I guess I’d better become familiar with the notion of a “book bible.”

Oy. It’s exhausting to realize that the real work starts after the first draft is finished.