It's a strange thing, but I did not realise how twisted up the time lines were in book one.

The structure of the Kissiltur books is to follow multiple characters as they go about their lives, giving one chapter to each character then back to the start. It's a pretty common structure, but the presumption is that the characters are experiencing time pass at roughly the same rate, if not necessarily at the same point in time.

I was reading a chapter last night in book one which followed character B and it read OK, but then it finally registered that this guy was on his second chapter, which occurred the day after the first, but the other two characters have experienced three days and several weeks respectively. And it's going to get worse.

So, do I try to rework things so that the characters experience time roughly in sync? I don't know - as with so much with this editing process, the first thing to do is to gather information about what's going on in the text now.

And that's five minutes.

Posted by Dunx at March 2, 2009 10:39 AM