Chapter 3 (confusion)

The thing about Chapter 3 is that I keep rewriting what information H learns in this chapter and how/when she learns them. And that affects how she acts and interacts with K, their ensuing conversations, and so on. And the worst thing is, I've rewritten it so many times that I have trouble keeping straight what she knows at what point. I keep having to go back and reread to get into her head again, and that just stalls me terribly. Keeping notes might be a good idea.

Shrug

It's strange the things you end up researching. I keep falling making the fallacy of imposing our culture onto the one I'm writing about. If I want my character to show indifference, she shrugs. Only did she? I felt sure that I was imposing my own cultural norms onto hers. They didn't shrug in 17th century Japan, surely. So I went on Wikipedia and looked up the shrug gesture, and voila, it says that it's a Western thing and is "relatively absent from Eastern culture." As I thought. No shrugging. Yay for accuracy. Now I have to figure out if there's another (accurate) way to express the same sentiment nonverbally.

Sky

As far as description goes, I really like writing about the sky. It's usually only a sentence (because unless it's a really unusual sky, who really wants to read about the sky for more than a sentence?), but that's more than enough. There're a million different ways to describe the sky, based on the colors, time of day, and how you're feeling. I have trouble describing anything poetically, but at least with the sky, I try. It's pleasing to come up with a new way to describe the sky. I think my bias will be obvious once I get my story written. Chapter 3 has two sky descriptions so far.