A little while ago, I made a rambly post about how it might be problematic that a sizeable but not sizeable enough chunk of the book takes place in 1588, while the rest of it is in 1590. It’s about twenty-one thousand words, which is way too long to be anything like a prologue, but not really a third of the book, which I could justifiably label “Part One” and move on from there.

It is, however, approximately a fifth of a book.

And the five-act structure was, y’know, really popular back then.

So despite the fact that this book may end up having nothing to do with theatre aside from a title ganked from Marlowe, Midnight Never Come will be delivered in five Acts, possibly with a prologue and an epilogue, despite the usual shortcomings of such devices. I read up on five-act structure, so the book wouldn’t just be arbitrarily chopped into fifths, and it seems like it will fit very well. This was a pretty suitable Act Two, at least, and the next one will most definitely be an Act Three.

Anyway, I expected to be making this post tomorrow night or possibly the night after. But the Lune scene I was finishing ended about thirty words short of my 1K quota, and rather than falling into the bad habit of padding it out to make my goal (or letting myself stop, like a sane person might), I decided to get at least thirty words into the next scene.

. . . only, in the act of typing the scene header (I’m identifying where and when each scene takes place, since the story covers so much of both time and space), I changed my mind entirely about what the scene would be. Deven can do all that stuff I was intending at the beginning of Act Three. The last scene of Act Two ended up being less than three hundred words long — which is why I just wrote the whole damn thing. It seemed silly to get thirty words in and stop. So instead of starting a scene that would have taken at least one night to finish, probably two, I’m done right now.

Two Acts down. Three to go.

It’s a good place to be.

Authorial sadism: Swift kicks to the kidneys, and the unexpected replacement scene.

LBR quota: They’re all blood, you see.