Warning: shop talk ahead.
Though, I'm beginning to figure out that many of my readers are also writers themselves, so perhaps my shoptalk is not so boring as I imagine it to be.
Anyway, boy, did I ever have a hard time getting into the second part of Torri. I had to change my whole mind set, do a fair amount of research and think through a fair ways through the story.
I don't particularly enjoy this sort of "set up." I prefer to write my way straight through, if you know what I mean. After all, if I enjoyed researching, I'd be writing historical fiction or some other genre of that type. Since I write straight out of my head, no fact checking is necessary! Yay.
I wanted to make the feel of the Kagamihara completely different from the mountains and sometimes my imagination is limited to certain patterns that I gravitate toward. The more I write, the more I recognize them.
So I did a little, light research on Inuit customs and language (read: I found vocabulary lists and read wikipedia articles) and used that to flavor the new characters that I introduced.
Then, as usual, I wrestled with transition. Where do I pick up the story? Ugh. I hate the nebulousness of writing sometimes, the lack of a hard and fast rule.
Here's a pretty good rule of thumb that I have discovered: if you hate writing it, and/or think writing it will be tedious, it's highly probable that your readers will not enjoy reading it either.
At that point, I have found that it's helpful to stop thinking about how you can write it and start thinking about how you can avoid writing it while maintaining the continuity of your story.
That's what I ended up doing, myself. I didn't want to write about the whole, coming down the mountain, outfitting themselves for the trip, spending the night in lodging and heading across the border. It's full of tedious detail.
I do love detail; frequently I get a little drunk on detail and throw way too many in there. However, I like the interesting detail, the charming, the transporting, the thing that makes it present and real and individual. I don't like the tedious how-to detail; I don't like this as a writer and unless the author is marvelous, I don't like it as a reader.
So, I ended up blissfully skipping that entire part. The first part of the story ends with Yuudai, the O-minami daitoku, giving Gilly a very beautiful benediction that I lifted in its entirety from Psalm 139. It's quite astoundingly perfect for the beginning of the worst: if Gilly makes her bed in Hell, still Christ is there. If she rises on the wings of the dawn and settles on the farthest end of the sea, still His hand guides her.
Marvelous, no?
The end. Then, part two opens with the characters standing right on the southern wastes. I describe what they see, I spare a paragraph to briefly sketch out how they got there, then I describe them in detail, then the curtain goes up on new characters.
I'm not yet sure how this works; I will have to write further into the story before I have adequate perception on that. But it enabled me to start writing again and that is the key. Everything can be rewritten, but you have to start writing something in order to fix it.
I don't have anything I'm ready to share yet; I'm still tweaking the new characters. I like it though; I think I'm heading in the right direction.
