Touch: Book 2 of The Queen of the Dead

I have just finished reading Touch: Book 2 of The Queen of the Dead by Michelle Sagara.  You may remember that I counted Silence, the first book in the series, as one of the stand out reads of last year.  I would like to say this was as good, and it has many fine qualities, but it felt rough by comparison.  What I mean by that is there were phrases that threw me out of the text.  Another was a passage on page 218 where I can only assume a piece of text was eliminated when editing the book.  The story is also clearly the middle part of a trilogy, which ends with our heroes left with having to take down the big bad.

This is a problem lots of middle books in trilogies have.

However, all these criticisms aside, this was a book I'm glad I've read, because I like the way the characters are developed through the story.  All of the main protagonists feel like real people, and the formation of the gang who will go on into the next book to face down the Queen of the dead was nicely done.  From reading Michelle's blog I know that she had a lot of problems writing this book, but besides my minor copy-edit quibbles she delivers the story.  What more can you ask for than that?

Work wise this week has seen me restart writing my novel The Bureau.  Scrivener says I wrote 2,934 words, bringing the running total up to 40,049.  Looking back to February I see I had reached 38,957, which by my calculation makes 1,092.  This means that Scrivener is doing something very clever in tracking my word count when I rewrite things.  Anyway, in the break between then and now, I figured out what I needed to add to Act 2 to make it work, or at least make it suck less.

Susan, my Alpha reader, is in the process of re-reading Bad Dog and marking up errors in the text.  So yesterday I was editing Act 1, and today I will be editing Act 2, and when I've finished doing that I imagine I will be doing the edits for Act 3.  And so it goes on.  One of the things that is troubling me though is how long this all this takes.

Changing tack, this week we obviously watched the latest Dr Who episode called Listen.  I really liked it, but I liked all the previous episodes.  Even Robot of Sherwood, which was an over-the-top farce.  What can I say?  I'm a fan.

We also rewatched both the Marvel Captain America films this week prior to watching Winter Soldier.  Really enjoyed the series, and one can see that the writers were skillful in executing the foreshadowing and call-backs through the trilogy; though Avengers Assemble is not strictly the middle film of the Captain America trilogy,  it serves to connect the first film to the second.  The way the stories were told really show how to write the middle part of a series without falling into the usual trap of having an ending that is just the set-up for the next story.

In short make all your stories self-contained; complete in their own right.

TV wise we've started watching Xena: Warrior Princess - Ultimate Collection.  Yes all six seasons for a total of 132 episodes.  We may be some time.