The Pirate Moot

The first four chapters of The Pirate Moot are posted.

I have already forgotten how much of Book Two I had posted on the old site,and I didn't save the old site to go check, but realistically, only the first four chapters were ever even close to being ready to post.

So that means things slow down a little since everything after here needs serious editing if not serious deleting.

I know the best practice is to try to forge through, with maybe a proofing and editing of each chapter once it is done, and then go back and revise later, but, honestly, I backburnered this for so long that I have forgotten much of what I wrote. And since I have to touch it anyway….

Anyway, I need to get myself back up to speed on what happened before I can go telling it to other people.

Book Two is longer than Book One by a fair margin and will have quite a few short chapters. If I were getting paid by the word, these chapters would not tide me over well.

The books aren’t really meant to be volumes. Rather, each is the completion of a full thought, a breakpoint where the story shifts to a new focus. Book One, if anything, is a prologue that sets the stage for the story. The sort of thing that editors might suggest deleting: Finished writing your book? Good, now throw out the first chapter. But it doesn't really have anything superfluous and means I can skip exposition in Book Two.

I could also have done really long chapters with the current chapters as section breaks in thse chapters, but I don’t like really long chapters. I like frequent clearly defined breaks where I can put down my book to go get more tea or deal with the fact that I have really had too much tea already or something. Overly long chapters feel like the really big version of a run-on sentence, or at least the speech that goes on for half an hour after the speaker says, “and in conclusion, I would like to…,” for the third time.

Academic texts are supposed to be interminable (okay, maybe they aren't supposed to be, they just are), fiction should be engrossing and entertaining. Otherwise why read it?