Yeah, it's been a while since I've done a writing progress update, isn't it? I confess I've gotten a little knocked off the tracks with respect to blogging in the past month and I keep reminding myself that one of my New Year's Irresolutions was not to beat myself up about that. (Poor Abiel LaForge is sitting there on the front lines waiting for the war to end.) So where are we...?
Looking at my revised chapter outline, I have two and a half chapters to go to complete my zeroeth draft of Floodtide. "Zeroeth draft" because there are still a bunch of placeholders and "expand this"s and "this needs to get moved elsewhere"s. But in two and a half chapters, I'll have written through to the end of the book. That's something.
When people ask me about my writing process, my usual response is, "I'll let you know when I've used the same one twice." And Floodtide is no exception. None of my previous first drafts were quite this chaotic, in part because I've usually broken my rule about "no re-writing until I'm done writing." For the two previous books, having a complete draft felt like I could predict fairly solidly how soon I'd be ready to present the manuscript to my publisher. This time, I haven't even sent off a formal proposal letter yet because I have no good estimate of how long it's going to take me to whip the story into shape.
Part of that is because I plan to go out and hire myself a developmental editor who knows something about what a good YA fantasy should look like to help me make Floodtide the best book it can be. And I don't know how long that process will take, either finding the right person or working through the revisions with them. It's a bit of an unsettled feeling, but since I want Floodtide to be a book that can be an independent introduction to Alpennia, I figure it's worth taking the time.
(Oh, and the river isn't actually still rising at this point. The waters have started to recede. But not the troubles.)
Comments4
As always, I find discussions
As always, I find discussions of writing process fascinating. I look forward to hearing more about how this one unfolds!
Mistress of Shadows is going
Mistress of Shadows is going to involve yet another shift in process, though perhaps more subtle. Because that's where I'm going to stop trying to follow everyone simultaneously. Just three points of view: Barbara, Serafina, and Zobaida. Most of the action in Paris (except for some of the initial chapters). And the critical stuff that other people are doing during the same period in Alpennia is going to go elsewhere, most likely in an assortment of short fiction. Which raises the difficult question of whether that assortment waits to come out until after Mistress of Shadows, or comes out before it, or simultaneous with it, or maybe ahead of time to mailing list subscribers (which I haven't set up yet) and later for others, or...?
Clearly I couldn't just keep adding points of view, and the complete shift to first person in Floodtide may help people adjust to that (plus the geographic shift).
I also keep waiting for readers to pick up on the fact that every book is a different genre flavor.
It was really strange coming
It was really strange coming here directly from Jenny Crusie's blog and reading some of the same things. Estimating submission time? Check. Different methods for different manuscripts? Check.
No, I haven't noticed different genre flavors. Not surprising since I don't pay much attention to genre.
I'm actually hoping that
I'm actually hoping that readers don't fixate too much on whether a particular book is more of a romance or more of a thriller or more of court intrigue or whatever. But for me it's more fun to have that slightly different flavor for each book.