Things have changed

My new agent works really fast.  I approve of this, because I do too.  While on a mission to get to New York City in spite of multiple flight cancellations and delays, she read through Pariah's Moon and got back to me with some feedback.  First of all, she complimented me on my syntax.  Seriously, who does that?  It's like something I should get tattooed on my forehead a la Raven from Neil Stephenson's Snow Crash, only instead of his "Poor Impulse Control", mine would be "Has Good Syntax."  She also complimented me on my use of active voice, which made me feel really good.  I've been doing this for a lot of years working to hone my craft, and no single thing made a bigger difference in learning how to write than when I finally understood the difference between passive and active voice. Now if I can just learn to stop using those pesky ellipses and hyphens, I'll really know something.

The other thing she brought up to me was the use of first person perspective.  She thought the book would be even stronger if I switched it to a third person outside narrative.  She explained that the narrative voice didn't match the main character's voice (seriously, who notices stuff like that?  LOVE it!).  Pariah's Moon is the first novel-length project I've written in first person perspective ("I" and "me" instead of "he" and "his").  Everything else I write in third person, which is a more natural narrative voice for me.  Clearly, when writing Pariah's Moon I translated that natural voice into first person and it worked okay, but could work a lot better if I switched it back.

So, that's what I'm doing.  Draft 7 of this bugaboo of a manuscript that's taken a hefty fourteen months of work will be in third person instead of first.  That will be my nights-and-weekends project, where Champion will be my early-morning-and-daytime project, written primarily (like Blackout was) on my BlackBerry.