The messy bit - the book in pieces!

I hope this is going to work! The book is now divided into scenes, and these have been reordered into a more even spread of the two strands. I'm also working on trying to end each chapter on some tension, a bit of a cliff hanger (ish). At the moment, it's an almighty mess and is a huge heap of paper covered in coloured scribbles.
One advantage is that I'm seeing the story afresh, as different moods are created by each new chapter. The downside is that I seem to have gone from 48 quite chunky chapters to 72 little ones, and am acquiring what I think will be another ten or so thousand words. Here I'm getting a bit nervous, because my reading has suggested not going too far over 100k. I am looking at it afresh, which has the effect of liking it more! Plus, when I went for the competition at Mslexia, I threw the last historical chapters together and sidestepped how the good guys got away from the bad guys by adding a quick epilogue.

The countess, I hear, is fat with chylde, and her husband is back at the Turkish front. Of Zsófia, there are just rumours. Her bodie was left in the forest, covered in bites, drayned of blood. Or, she lives as a pale shadow, opening her vayns for her mistresses to suckle.

I have no paper left to explayn how we escaped the clutches of the Inquisition, and made our way to Vienna, to meet up with our tearful wives. It is an adventure in ittself, and when I am seated in a quiet room in England, with a well trimmed pen and fresh vellum, I will tell the storie.

What a cheap cop out! Now I have a few fabulous scenes to play with it will be a lot easier to balance the story up with the two strands both having action scenes to resolve them properly. I'm adding a short extract of Kelley's memoirs to each chapter, that tell bits of the backstory and show us the strange culture of 1580's Europe. In this country we grow up thinking everywhere's a bit the same us Britain, with our 'Elizabethan England' but the rest of the Latin speaking world was much more dynamic and interesting than Britain's relative stability. It also shows (hopefully) Kelley's egocentric, rather cowardly character which makes him more of an everyman than the high minded Dee. I wonder what the agent will think though?