The Path Chapter 8

I've finished chapter 8 of the first draft of The Path and it can be downloaded at the bottom of this page.

Well, when i got home from work yesterday there was a note from the apartment management taped to the door of my retarded neighbor basically saying that they've recieved numerous complaints from other residents, as well as several notifications from teh police of being sent out because of noise disturbances and one more would result in eviction. Since then, it's been blessedly quiet, and i've been able to concentrate on writing instead of on how much I wish someone would dump my neighbor into a wood chipper.

Anyway, this chapter begins where we left off, with Sam confronting the insane AI Roddy. It ties this storyline up with a nice neat bow. There are some clues here to a MAJOR plot twist that will be coming a few chapters from the end, but I'm not gonna say what they are until then. Stark also makes an appearance to really get Sam thinking on the question that has haunted her ever since Ethos.

I also made some changes to the end of hte previous chapter, mostly having to do with how the fight starts. I removed the bit where Roddy ofers to turn off the transmission if she beats him, because it was retarded and contrived.

One thing I've found is that I have a limit to how many main characters i can have in any given scene without one or two of them fading into teh background. That limit is 4. But now I've got 7 characters together, and in the next storyline with these characters that is going to become 8. My solution to this is to have them fall into situations where they are required to split up. This keeps the scenes from being bogged down by too many main characters being present, and makes it easier for me to keep track of people's personalities and how they would all react to any given thing. Most of the storylines with these characters in this book are going to have them being split up like this one. If you look at Spires of Infinity, every time I got more than 4 of the main characters together in the same place, they split up almost immediately. Putting main characters into a scene is kind of like juggling. The more characters you put in, the more complicated it gets, and the harder it is to keep things moving.