No More New Friends

Well, I toughed it out and worked on the "Grapevine" chapter this morning. As with everything else, this chapter -- occuring immediately after Maya Daniels is brought back to life and showing the mutation of the facts as the "story" gets further and further away from eye-witnesses -- needs significant work. It's written from an omniscient viewpoint with intrusive narration. The idea of the chapter is good, it just needs reworking, including possibly being divided into three much shorter chapters.

It also marks what I think will be last case where new characters are introduced. We get a lot of new names here, 17, some of which will never be heard of again, but a few that will play significant roles in future events -- Maya's dad, Richard, for instance. We'll meet the spouse of one of the characters introduced here at the end of the next section, but he's basically just a prop and later zombie fodder. We haven't met Mrs. Olson, Jacob's mother, in the flesh yet, either, but we know she exists. Gantt's roustabouts are shown prior to this, just not named. I need to find a way to introduce the Calculus teacher, Mr. Prentiss, before this point; he's the last of the new characters that get introduced.

It's kind of an infodump of names, but the variations in The Saga of Maya Daniels should keep folks reading (I hope!).