Wednesday, February 06, 2008

Major Re-org

I went through my chapter outline for Shifts of Perception and decided to do some shuffling of scenes in chapters 1 - 12. It's not so much that things were in the wrong order--they weren't--but some of the chapters were extremely long, while the last one was short. That isn't a problem and I've certainly read plenty of books with wildly varying chapter lengths, but for whatever reason, my test readers seem to like it if my chapters have a consistent length. More importantly, each chapter also has to end in such a way that a reader will want to keep reading. Not always a cliffhanger, necessarily, but a definite intriguing note that makes people wonder what's going to happen next.

Kudos to Patricia Briggs and her latest success, Iron Kissed, which not only made but topped the NYT bestseller list and is one of the type of books I just mentioned--the type that keeps you wondering what happens next, so that you have a very hard time putting the book down.

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