As has been previously indicated, I've now completed the planning for the first act of Goodspider the Mad, and started planning the second.

 This whole 'planning' lark is a new one to me, which is kind of why it's taking so long. The first book I tried to write, Coldtouch and Dark, had no real planning and so fell apart in the second act in a rather heart-breaking way. This time, I'm unashamedly hyper-correcting: planning on a chapter-by-chapter, scene-by-scene basis, trying to pull the whole thing together in shorthand before I write it long hand. It's working pretty well, so far, but there's a part of me that wants to throw my hands up in the air and just start going at it. The only problem with that is that I know it won't work.

 I've also been recycling. The title characters of Coldtouch and Dark fit in this new book's second act rather well, albeit with a little tweaking. Their established dynamic is an engaging one, and one I know how to write. Because they're secondary characters in Goodspider, it leaves me free to put a lot of their character arcs off-screen, shedding the millstone-like weight of exposition and freeing them to be the fun, interesting characters I always wanted them to be.

 One also becomes conscious, when one plans in detail, of just how much an authorial voice matters. When you can review your complete story in every major detail, it makes you realise that there are things that you want to say with the book, things you always thought were implicit but aren't. And it also makes you realise that there are other things you are saying that you don't necessarily want to, things that have flown unbidden form your subconcious and made nests in the text. It's a very odd process, writing something long-form. You put a lot of yourself in, and sometimes what comes out surprises you.

P.S: Thank you Microsoft Office for the acres of useless crud you attached to the head of this post.