Decisions, decisions

Aaargh! Update Time!

So here I am in the middle of two WIPS.

Constant Tower for a Christian publisher and Dark Inheritance for a black secular publisher. So am toning down the sex in Constant Tower and making the main character a white male. And am toning up the sex in Dark Inheritance and making the main character a black female. Hey, am I pliable or not? Men read a lot of fantasy. Men like male main characters. Christians who read fantasies are used to fantasies with white characters and male characters. (And sex isn't in the picture generally.) Black books written by black women usually have female male characters. (And sex is everywhere.) So as I said "I'm amenable." I do what is necessary to do to be published. So, it's not as if I'm gonna die if I have to do certain things.

Got some decisions to make though. In Inheritance do I want to go ahead with the succubi idea? I mean, honestly! How far do I want to go with that? I do want to deal with sexual evil, though. And I want my hero to truly be tempted with perversion...but honestly...do I want to enter the mind of a serial rapist? Do I want to make my hero a creep for a long while in the book? As it is, it's a sweet little story, living gently all by its lonesome. So what to do?

Second decision: In Constant Tower I'm always talking about the "annals." Dang! I'm 200 pages in the book and now I'm kinda regretting all those stupid annals I mentioned. A part of me says that maybe I should put quotations from theses so-called annals at the beginning of each chapter or at least at the beginning of the book. But heck, A) I hate prologues. And B) I think I got that idea from Seaborn. Which is one way deep and complicated book. Constant Tower isn't poetically complicated but its world and rules are complicated. Several folks who read Wind Follower said the glossary helped them immensely. So in a world where the science is based on music, do I need a glossary? Or should I do the chapter headings thingey?

So that's where yours truly is. Other than that all is well.

Will have a review of Seaborn for compulsivereader.com and blogcritics.com sometime next week. -C