Not so soggy middle

 This week I’ve had a bit of a break from my novel re-write while I got some short stories written and sent out.  I wanted to take a break because I felt that I was in the soggy middle of the book, and it was slowing down.

When I came back to the chapters I’d most recently written I realised that it wasn’t as slow, or as drab, as I thought.

One of the reasons I thought it was slowing down was because I had a character sitting having a confessional with another.  He’s just nearly killed someone, and he feels disturbed about how angry he felt, and how close he came to taking that life.  He is ex-military, so he has killed people before, but he felt that this time he didn’t have the right and was losing his discipline.

That chapter is short, and most of it is in dialogue, so the pace is a lot faster than I realised,  It also gave me the opportunity to tell the reader a little bit of that character’s history.  I slip in there that he used to be in a relationship with a man, which he broke off when he became injured and got fitted with a prosthetic arm and leg.  Reading that chapter through, it comes across as a powerful reveal of who this character really is, and I’m happy with it now.

Another chapter which I thought was soggy has two characters examining part of the dockside for signs of sabotage.  They find them, and one of the characters realises there is an explosive device attached to a suspect component.  So in fact, the supposedly soggy middle chapter has ended up as a scene of tense waiting while bomb disposal experts come in and try to defuse the device.

The middle of the story is where I’m starting to tie the threads together for the big set-piece scene at the end of the novel.  In the original manuscript, over thirty years old, I’d never properly tied together all the reasons for the sabotage and the attacks which took place.

This time round I know they all need to link back to a sinister cult which keeps preaching about the opening of the way.  The senior members of that cult are all Oriellish, the junior ones all human.  The two species fought a major war a century ago, which the Oriellish lost.  The centenary of the end of that war is coming up soon, and I’ve now added in the Oriellish planning some retaliation.  This will be the opening of the way.

So now I’ve linked all the sabotage incidents together, and used my soggy middle to lay an essential trail of clues.  It’s not so useless after all.