WIP Wednesday

Wait. It’s June? Already? Well let me crawl out of this black hole/editing purgatory I’ve been living in for the past thirty days and take stock of my WIPs.

First things first. Orphans Of Paradise has officially entered into that stage where I can barely open the word doc without vomiting in my mouth a little bit. I always hate this part. You fall in love with something and then you tear it to pieces. Again. And again. And again. And you’re on your final copy edit and all you want to do is shoot someone in the face, usually your lead character, sometimes your spouse.

This is always the hardest part for me. Apparently a few of my beta readers have fallen off the face of the earth so I didn’t get as much feedback on my most recent draft as I wanted to and on top of that I’ve read the thing so many times that I can’t tell if it’s terribly boring and predictable or if it only seems that way because…well I wrote it and have been reading it over and over for the past two months. I am crawling through these last two hundred pages but that’s better than nothing I guess. And at least I came to a decision about the companion novella.

I’ve scratched it. Instead I decided to break the book into parts. This actually helped my pacing issues a lot and as far as adjusting the style, well it’s making this final line edit torture to say the least. But it’s getting there. Is it perfect? No. Will it be? No. But I have to be ok with that. I refuse to be one of those writer’s who’s so gun shy they end up working on the same manuscript for years. That’s insanity. And why shelve a story for its mild imperfections when it could possibly have the potential to still resonate emotionally with people?

On a more positive note, I’ve just finished the 3^rd draft of book 3. Good news is I’m still pretty infatuated with this one and I’m hoping my beta readers will be too. I’ll be sending it off to them this weekend.

And in the meantime, after I’ve finished the final edits for Orphan Of Paradise, I’ll be jumping back into the next draft of book 4.

2nd and 3rd drafts are always beasts. For me they’re usually total re-writes and my word count usually jumps significantly. It’s the draft where I finally get a good handle on my character’s motivations—who they are, what they want. All of the essential ingredients start to fall in line and the story takes it’s true shape. It’s exciting and it’s confusing and it’s one of my favorite parts about writing. I like putting the pieces together, re-arranging them, seeing how they fit. And I love finding that subconscious synchronicity because I’m always surprised at how incredibly clever I am.

I’ll also be toying with a novella for book 3. It’s been simmering for a while and I’ve written about 10k but I’ve recently found a new starting point. A stronger one and I think this time it’ll work.

Scanning over this post, I’ve obviously got a lot of things in the works right now. But that’s a good thing. It means I’m growing. It means I’m making progress and it means that my dreams aren’t all that far away from coming true.