Good morning to you, Flamefolk.

Do your characters get along?

I have a novel I started back in 2008 that is a far-future, full sci-fi, epic adventure through the stars. It is very precious to me as it was the first work of long fiction that I was ever able to commit myself to intensely and it was my NaNoWriMo project for that year. I reached a word count of about 165k after NaNo (without an ending). Exhausted, I put it away for a bit. When I took it back out I saw that it was not an unfinished novel but a great word beast that needed cropped, tamed, trained, deloused, and quite possibly exorcised.

My solution to this was to start rewriting the tale in snippets that condensed scenes to the best parts I’d written the first time around. I shared one such snippet with Boyfriend, my official beta…