Half way through this draft

Today I reached the half way point of draft of my novel, The Sphinx Scrolls. It’s taken me 29 days to get this far through the draft. Hopefully the second half won’t take so long because I always find that I spend far longer on getting the opening chapters right. Later chapters are easier because characters and storylines are already established. What matters most at the start is how those elements are introduced in a subtle, elegant and interesting way, and that’s what takes so long to do well.

I’m at a point in the story where hints start appearing that the underlying military situation in Central America is getting critical. This prepares the reader for what is revealed in later chapters when the ancient threat to the modern world starts to emerge and the tension escalates.

Ruby is now at a French military base, but thanks to the influence of Guatemala’s President she is still unable to go free. She’s torn between her desire to escape and the excitement that she feels at being involved in this amazing archaeological project. When I get to the next draft I think I’ll get her to discover something new about the nature of the project she is working on, and that will give her a fresh, clear goal. The old draft simply showed her having a ‘hunch’ that she needed to get to the Sphinx in Egypt to find the answers. A hunch is a lame literary device, and I am ashamed that it was previously there. The new draft will follow far more interesting plot developments based on her friend Ratty’s research into a Mayan stele and a cathedral tomb.

In other news today, on the treadmill I knocked another 20 seconds off my 5 kilometre personal best – I’m now 7 minutes faster at this distance than I was two months ago. But it’s getting pretty tough to run at that speed. I need to lose more weight if I’m going to get any faster because right now I’m carrying far too much lard around my waist. I also finished a section in the language course I’m studying. And, finally, I had to return a DVD to Blockbuster by 9pm. My stupid cheap Blu-Ray player won’t eject a disk until it’s spent five minutes booting up, so I was five minutes late returning Marley and Me to the hire shop and I’m going to get fined for it. So the money I saved by buying the crappiest Blu-Ray player on the market is going to get eaten up by late rental fines. That’ll teach me. Hmph.