Monday, March 25, 2013

Poof! I'm Gone

So, some of you may have wondered where I've gotten to these last couple of weeks.  I'll admit, I haven't been the most reliable about getting these blog posts up, and I thought I should tell you all what's going on, and why I've been so distracted.

First of all, there's the project I'm currently working on.  Dangerous Waters is a book that I wrote in 2011.  It was the first high fantasy that I tried, and at first I thought it was fantastic.  Until I realized that I shoved an epic fantasy into a 100k word count novel.  If you've ever thought that you were missing scenes in your books, you're certainly not the only one.  I had so many sticky notes in that book telling me that I had to add chapters and scenes that I'm pretty sure if I had actually finished all of the editing, I would have, at the very least, doubled the word count.

I didn't, however (once I discovered that I had actually not written the climax.  That, in fact, none of my protagonists were in the climax, and instead the villain was simply injured by a peripheral character off screen, I decided that enough was enough and shelved it).  I decided that there was simply too much work that needed to be done on it to make the project worth the effort.  I had too many other ideas bouncing around in my head, competing with each other for attention.

In short, I had to set aside the characters that had unreliably told me a story (okay, so I told a bad story) and hope that the next one was better.

Strangely, though, as much as I would like to simply shelve the project and forget about how bad it was, I couldn't stop thinking about the characters.  It may have something to do with the fact that at least one of those characters has been someone whose story I've been trying to write for years (She was actually from a short story I wrote for school in grade eight).  But I knew that I Had to pick that project back up again.

About a month ago I decided that I was going to rewrite a novel this year.  Which meant that I had to pick from my shelved projects.  It was a tough decision, but with the help of some friends I finally decided that Kaszet, Bridalea and Atliah deserved another chance, and I dug it out.

First I had to replan the whole thing.  I didn't just want to take what I had and go from there.  No, if I was going to be rewriting it, I might as well take a hard look at the plot.  I stripped it down to it's bare bones, and then reshaped that before adding in  more.

Eventually I finished with the plotting (that was where most of my disappearing happened.  See, I got so caught up in the project, the thought of stepping away from it even for the short amount of time it takes me to write a blog post, just wasn't something I was willing to do.) and now I've moved onto the writing portion of it.

I've got to tell you.  In two days I've managed to get up to just shy of 8k words, and I'm loving it so far.  I'm writing about as much as I normally write during nano, and that's not something that I say very often.  I'm motivated and can't wait to get started on it.  I was supposed to be working on this during camp nano, and here I am, writing it already!  There was no stopping myself.

So, I'm going to keep working on that.  I'm enjoying myself, which sometimes I forget to do while I'm writing.  I get into the story, and the frustration starts to set in.  Suddenly I find myself not wanting to write because the scene is too difficult, or even just because there's that show I wanted to watch on TV.  Soon I realize that I've lost all of the time I had set aside for writing, and I get mad at myself.

Not with this project, though.  If the beginning is any indication, I should be able to finish up this draft before the end of April.

Then again, plans almost never work out the way you think they will.

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