I think I broke my head last night, because it hasn’t worked all morning. That’s the problem with suddenly leaping from writing NDC to proofing the abridgement of DYLING LIGHT. Hopping back and forth in time, trying to keep a handle on what’s going on in both places and not confuse them. Especially as NDC is proving to be tough one to write. Finishing up at stupid o'clock didn't help either.
In order to shake stuff up a bit, NDC isn’t a serial killer book*. That added to the fact I spent so long writing nothing but short stories before Christmas, is making it quite twisty and complicated. There’s a lot of layers in this one, all of which have to be juggled. Tough.
Plus I’m playing with a slightly different format. Normally what happens is that the crime starts at the beginning of the book, gets worked through, and concluded at the end. Not for NDC. Because there are multiple crimes, some start at the beginning, while others are coming to a halt at the same time, and others don’t even show their faces until halfway in. Stuff overlaps and changes all the time.
The idea is that you can usually tell when you’re being handed a red herring in a book, because if they’ve got someone in custody by page fifty, you can be pretty sure it’s going to be someone else. Not with NDC. Sometimes it’ll just be the end for that thread. But my natural tendency is to see patterns within patterns, draw things together. Which I’m fighting. I want NDC to almost be like a slice of time for the characters. Not every arc will be resolved. Because life’s not like that.
Just have to hope to hell I can pull it off. (in a non-dirty way).
*Partially to shake things up, and partly because Book 4 (if there is one) is going to be a biggie for serial. Like a warehouse full of cornflakes. That’s how serial it’s going to be.