Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Not so fast Percy

Not so fast Percy

After I finished with my second edit of Habit of Despair it became clear that there were some pieces that had been left hanging and some areas that needed further elaboration.

I mean it “flew” but it just wasn’t buttoned down the way I wanted it to be. For example some key characters that needed to be there weren’t and some that were needed to be better accounted for. For example:

1. There needed to be a funeral ceremony for the Count, Angelina’s husband that would introduce some future characters. I decided that Angelina and Teresa needed to be sisters and they would have a brother who was a strange little guy inclined to mathematics who would break the ciphers on legers Ricardo discovers at the end of book one.

2. Second since Teresa’s parents were New Christians it would be good to let Angelina’s bungling of a well intentioned escape attempt implicate Ricardo and his new wife Teresa, and get him dragged before the Inquisition.

3. Of course Carlos and the budding relationship with Angelina could be expanded….This would increase the word count of the first novel, set up the second, and tie these loose ends together.

I wish in a sense that I would have known when I started out what I do now….it would have enabled me to get it right the first time but that hasn’t been the case and rather than snivel I need to fix it. Better now than have an editor tell me down the road. This novel needs to be as good as I can make it. My age is already one strike and I think that editors are more inclined to accept risk from an unpublished younger writer than and unpublished older writer. It could well be that I am screwed regardless of the quality, however I’ll let the system decide that and not take myself prematurely out of the game.