Monday, September 30, 2013

That Was A Bit Of An Ordeal

I have a book-length work-in-progress that is actually in progress. This is the first time since the eBook publication effort for Saving the Planet & Stuff. Huzzah.

I got started on this in April, prepping for May Days, a unit of time I used to plan scenes for this project. Planning scenes is like plotting but different. Perhaps it could replace plotting for those who struggle with that.

I actually got started writing sometime this summer (maybe August?), working from that scene list. I was two and a half chapters and thirty-nine pages in, when I realized I still had a ways to go to get to the big disturbance to my protagonist's world. If you've been following my plotting posts for The Weekend Writer, you know that I'm very interested in the initial disturbance that starts a story. I had a secondary disturbance in the very first sentence, but the big one was taking a while to get to.

So for a little more than two weeks, I've been revising those two and a half chapters, changing the structure of the first chapter dramatically so that readers move back and forth between the day of the big reveal and how the protagonist got there. Instead of two and a half chapters and thirty-nine pages without reaching what I wanted to reach, I now have one twenty-eight page chapter, and I'm where I want to be to get the story going. In fact, the story is going.


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