Something happened in my writing style, between books two and three, and even between the first and second halves of book three. I think I had a break in writing for some reason and when I came back, the contemplative voice had taken over and started to run wild.
As you’ll know if you read my post on The Voices, I made the editorial decision to keep the contemplative voice in italics, to differentiate it from the narrative voice. This decision worked quite well, I think, throughout books one and two and even, still the first part of book three.
But now that the contemplative voice is dominating much of the text, it’s just italics everywhere, even after I’ve rewritten chunks of it, to change it from contemplative to narrative.
I don’t know what the solution is, at this point. If you’ve read the published book then you, dear reader, will know, but I do not. It’ll be either more rewriting to try to clear some of the pesky italics, or I might even change my whole rule about them. I do hate inconsistency, though, and suspect you will too. But will you hate it as much as the endless slopy text?
I wish you could slip back in time and place and pop up next to me now, with the answer to these questions: what will I decide, and will you like it?
If I was a History Maps NPC and you had on your VR set, you could do exactly that. But as far as I know (would I know?) I’m not, and you haven’t. So we can’t.
In the absence of this, I will have to decide for myself.