March Writing and April Plans
Mar. 31st, 2023 08:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerAs aforementioned, I finished a draft of The Sleeping Soldier! A draft that I am willing to let other people clap their innocent eyeballs on, no less! It took a mere three years… nine attempts… blood, sweat, and tears… okay I think there was no literal blood involved, but there were in fact tears.
What finally cracked it:
1. Accepting that I was simply going to have to spend a few chapters dealing with Russell’s grief about the fact that, you know, everyone he loved died while he was in that hundred year sleep, which ultimately meant rejiggering the timeline to include an extra year;
2. Making an outline, which is what got me excited enough to give the book another try despite copious failed attempts; and
3. Retyping the whole thing rather than copy-pasting from old drafts, as suggested in Matt Bell’s Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts. To be honest I thought this advice was barmy when I first read it, and it’s possible that it will never work again for any of my other projects, but at the moment I am a CONVERT.
Conveniently, I have another project ideally suited to this method! My YA novel Sage has existed as a complete but imperfect draft since 2016 and I would love to finish it and get it out there, even though it has the commercial prospects of a rutabaga. I love these girls! Everyone else should have a chance to meet them too! And I really do think it will make it slightly more saleable if Sage’s enemies-to-friends arc with her nemesis’s head minion Angelee extends to enemies-to-friends-to-lovers…
Oh, and I’ve got some prompt fics I need to write for Patreon. Maybe I will take a little break to tackle those before diving into Sage.
What finally cracked it:
1. Accepting that I was simply going to have to spend a few chapters dealing with Russell’s grief about the fact that, you know, everyone he loved died while he was in that hundred year sleep, which ultimately meant rejiggering the timeline to include an extra year;
2. Making an outline, which is what got me excited enough to give the book another try despite copious failed attempts; and
3. Retyping the whole thing rather than copy-pasting from old drafts, as suggested in Matt Bell’s Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts. To be honest I thought this advice was barmy when I first read it, and it’s possible that it will never work again for any of my other projects, but at the moment I am a CONVERT.
Conveniently, I have another project ideally suited to this method! My YA novel Sage has existed as a complete but imperfect draft since 2016 and I would love to finish it and get it out there, even though it has the commercial prospects of a rutabaga. I love these girls! Everyone else should have a chance to meet them too! And I really do think it will make it slightly more saleable if Sage’s enemies-to-friends arc with her nemesis’s head minion Angelee extends to enemies-to-friends-to-lovers…
Oh, and I’ve got some prompt fics I need to write for Patreon. Maybe I will take a little break to tackle those before diving into Sage.
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Date: 2023-03-31 08:48 pm (UTC)