NB: Although I’m posting parts of the GWWA story over the course of the next few weeks, those posts are prescheduled. This post was written after the GWWA posts that are set to go live in July.

I’ve been working on my GWWA story pretty regularly over the past few weeks, cramming in as much writing as I can. One thing I’ve noticed is that I get to a lot of “slow” parts when I’m writing. That doesn’t mean the plot isn’t moving forward; it’s more like “there’s no sex, spanking, or wrestling here, just character development”.

When writing my urban fantasy novel (which is published under a different name), I always felt like things were slowing down when I did the character development, as opposed to the action sequences where my characters got into battles. That can become hard to write, because (at least for me) I’m much more motivated when writing action sequences. It’s not that they’re more fun to write than character development — everything has its place in a good story — but they tend to flow better and faster. (Although, interestingly, when I start coming up on a spanking scene, if my day hasn’t been going well in general I’m like “ugh, now I have to figure out how to make this [super exciting and hot] thing interesting again.” I know that, to readers, all the spanking scenes are interesting, but as a writer there’s only so many ways to write one and I hate being repetitive.)

There are a lot of conversations in the GWWA story. I use them to move the plot along. Since Shannon lives alone (not really a spoiler), there’s no one for her to talk to while she’s at home, so I have to have her go various places in the story — kind of like how, in an adventure game, you would go to the same locations at different times in the game to get different information or items. But sometimes when playing adventure games (I’m thinking along the lines of Final Fantasy VII and FFX, which are two of my favorites, and even X-2, which uses the same world as X) it can get a little tiresome going from place to place and back again just to collect the next McGuffin, whether it be an item or a spoken clue. Similarly, when I’m writing the story — or any book, really (this is less likely to happen with short stories) — and I need to get the character some vital information it can feel slow or like I’m trudging from place to place.

At least, that’s how it feels when I write it. Usually during editing I’ll tighten up those parts so you as a reader don’t notice (hopefully), but when I go back and read the final draft before I upload it to Amazon or wherever I can tell where things slowed down for me, and those are the parts that I dislike reading the most. No matter how many good reviews (ahem!) I get on something, it’s still noticeable and I still worry.

Should I be worried? Have you noticed slow parts in any of my stories that probably should’ve been tightened? I’d love to hear your thoughts.