More book buying frenzy. This one came rather unexpectedly, for I'd put it on order back in November and Amazon spent the following months trying to track down a copy for me. Then it appeared on my doorstep yesterday, so the emails must have gone astray. Anyway I am glad to have the book , which is Aztec, Mixtec and Zapotec Armies, another Osprey "Men-at-Arms" book, full of cool pictures (the Mixtec war garb is particularly interesting, as well as the surprising information that royal Mixtec women had the political power to be "Queen" and wage war accordingly. I of course want to find out more about this for that has potential story written all over it.). Another nice addition to the research library.

This is more of a curiosity than anything, but after running a quick spell check  on the outline yesterday, to add the accent marks into my characters names after transferring my text from yWriter into Word, I noticed it scored an 12th grade reading level on their little Flisch-Kincaid reading level. The novel itself only scores a 6.5 level, so I'm curious about what constitutes the difference. How do they measure this anyway? Not that I need to know; just curious.

In other news, I'm planning to buy Duran Duran concert tickets this morning. They're going to be here at the new Wells Fargo Theater at the Convention Center May 12th.

But in the meantime, back to the outline.

I've outlined up to part 5 and now have to abandon the chapter by chapter approach I've been following so far and go for more broad strokes because I intend to completely butcher this last section of the book. The outline thus far has added two extra chapters, which has me growling (I'm supposed to be looking to cut, not add), and I don't imagine that the new last section will be any shorter than the original because, if anything, one of the complaints I've seen in early crits is that the climax comes on too quickly.

I'm probably stressing unnecessarily over this because I'm feeling that my cutting 30k is pretty paltry and now I'm actively adding on word count. I blame reading folks on Nathan Bransford's blog talking about how during revision they cut 50-100k on novels whose first drafts were of similar word count to my own and now I'm wondering if I haven't been merciless enough (though no I couldn't possibly imagine hacking a full 100k off this. Technically I would really like to cut another 10k off, but so far the new outline is throwing a monkey wrench in that plan.). I should stop thinking like this, at least for right now. I still have 3 crits coming to me by the seventeenth and I should see what they have to say before I grab a pair of scissor and a bottle of rum and butcher my manuscript while crying "why oh why must I do this?!"

Sigh.

Burrito time!!!!