Introspection

I swear that I have some sort of sleep disorder. I was tired last night, so I went to bed an hour early. I’m now awake; two and a half hours early.

Anyway, this is not about my introspection. It’s about character introspection.

Our intrepid squad (although they’re not known as that, yet) has been werewolfed. They were about to be Seniors in High School. They’re football buddies. This happens on day 29 (counting from ‘that day’).

They’re almost immediately hopping-to – all “yes, Alpha”, “thank you, Alpha”, etc… Part of it can be waved away as “Alpha is replacement for Coach”. Part of it cannot.

Chapter 18 (day 30) was all one day. I inserted an overnight so they could stay up and talk. I made them realize that it’s happening too fast – because the reader certainly will.

That scene is not complete, but I’m avoiding teenage angst and whining. They wonder what’s happening to them, what they’ve gotten themselves involved in, what they can do about it, if they want to do anything about it, etc…

This is not very LitRPG.

Way back when (January!), I complained about time in LitRPG books. Now, I’m doing it.

I have two choices: Add time, either by adding chapters or adding “three weeks later…”, or acknowledge it and make it plausible, somehow. In my complaint, I wrote:

Our intrepid hero has been in town for two and half days. He has already fought off the bandit chief, awakened a god in the forge at which he wants to apprentice, saved a miner from cave-dwelling lizard people, fought off an assassin, unclogged the town well – awakening the god of the well in the process, saved an arsonist, and gotten a romantic interest.

My instantly perfect werewolf recruits is less dramatic, but huge psychologically. If that guy had just stopped at some point and wondered, “you know, that’s a lot of shit. What’s up with this place?” Most of the problem would have gone away. It was everyone’s obliviousness to the issue that made it jarring. Even the town folk didn’t really notice. Each scene had its participants who noticed what happened around them, but no one said, “wow, that new guy’s awakening an awful lot of gods for his first week in town.”

So, introspection. Our intrepid pups notice, wonder about it, and decide to embrace it.

Our intrepid heroes are going to have a similar conversation in Chapter 20 (probably; it hasn’t gelled, yet). They, too, notice that they’re changing, shit’s moving fast, and embrace it.

I don’t see a choice. I don’t want to slow things down. Winter’s coming, to coin a phrase, and ducks need to be in rows.

Spending two weeks in werewolf boot camp might be interesting, but who would run it? I’ve ignored what’s happening to the rest of the world long enough. Another two weeks and disorganized town folks would be organized or starving. Even 30 days of milling about aimlessly is far too long.

I haven’t put a date on anything, yet. There is very little time-accounting in the text. “It’s been a month” is about it. I’m tracking everything as +x days in a separate document. This will let me shift the beginning to where it needs to be when I get to the first snowfall at the end.

As for the introspection, I’m going to finish writing the scenes. I think it’s important. Hopefully, I will not mangle it too badly; writing introspective teenage football players is more than a little outside my wheelhouse.

An unrelated “oops!”: In the middle of chapter 20, our intrepid hero is exhausted. A conversation goes badly sideways. “I can’t deal with this, now. Let’s pick it up tomorrow,” and walks away. Where does he go? He has nowhere to walk away to. Time to go back and add “find a base of operations” to chapter 19.

Update (0615 – alarm’s about to go off): I think it turned out decent. I left a lot of quotes unattributed so it’s not filled with “X said”, “Y observed”, “Z commented”. It reads like a free flowing bull session, I think. We’ll see what I think on the reread pass in a couple of days.

It also allows for another “and then they all slept” chapter ending. It’s not every chapter, but it’s common. I’m going to need reader feedback on that. I like it. It keeps the time flow nicely ordered. It’s also unusual. Problem for future me.

Meanwhile, I’m leaving the scene-separating, intra-chapter break thingy because there are six pages after that and I don’t want to move them, yet.