Hello, friends! This is just a quick blog post to let you know what’s been going on around here at the Palatial Horvath Estate over the past few months, lest you think the answer to that is “nothing,” which has sometimes been the case in the past.
As I hinted in last week’s post, I might not have been blogging much, but I have actually been working! Shocking but true! I don’t even KNOW me anymore!
Throughout January and February, I was able to write 90,000 words of the next Hardy Falls novel. For a reference point, that is a longish, full-length book. But at the beginning of March, I realized there was one teensy, tiny, wee bit of a little problem with all of that.
Those 90,000 words, although swell words in themselves, and just peachy keen to read, were not a book. They were a collection of scenes randomly racing about in a lot of different directions. Some of the scenes went out together and danced the macarena, and some were living in isolated huts deep in the rainforest and hunting poisonous frogs. And none of them added up to a novel.
*Sigh*
How did this state of affairs develop? Especially since I thought I had a plan at the beginning of the year?
The first reason is, I was flailing around and trying to find my footing in a lot of different areas of my life. Since a creative pursuit like writing comes from the inside, as I was flailing around, so thus was what came out of me. The words I wrote did not line up like little soldiers following the commands of the outline. No. They were children at a candy store, skipping from scene to scene to scene to scene to scene.
Still, that’s not too unusual for a first draft—at least not for one of my first drafts. But it did make me a little sad because I had hoped for a better result since I really did have an outline this time.
And therein lies the second reason the scenes I had written did not come together. I was determined to use my outline, even when it became somewhat obvious that I needed to regroup.
Once I got further into things and got to know the characters and the circumstances better, it became clear that the underlying story structure of the outline just didn’t work. But I tried to make it work. I had made up my mind that it would work. I was COMMITTED that it would work. I jammed square pegs into round holes over and over again, because damn it—this was going to WORK! It WAS! There was an OUTLINE, by gum! And that outline would be followed!
But, in the end, it did not work.
It did not work to the extent that even *I* had to admit it did not work.
Obviously, I need more practice with outlining. Or MAYBE, just maybe, using an outline in the way I was trying to use it is not something that works for me and I need to embrace my inner Betsy and find my own processes (more on that in another post).
Anyway, the story didn’t work.
*Sigh*
So, I bit the bullet, contacted my long-suffering editor to let her know I was going to screw with her schedule and dove into the mess. Hence, last week’s blog post.
I’m calling the draft I’m working on now the “Avengers Assembly” draft because I’m taking what’s been written and trying to piece it all together.
Maybe the “Frankenstein” draft would be a more accurate name.
The good news is, the Frankenstein draft is almost halfway finished and I have 40,000 words or so that are proud to stand up and be counted. They are words I can look at with pride and pet and love. Of course, the part of the story that’s left to pull together is the most problematic because it’s the part where the scenes already written really went off to party like it was 1999. It will take the longest to fix, if it can be fixed at all. What else is new?
Wait? What’s that sound? *cocks head* Is that a gentle breeze rustling through the trees? No. No, it’s the heartfelt sigh of a long-suffering editor.
But at least, as of the moment that I am writing this blog post, things seem to be sliding into place on the home front and the book front, so I’m hoping to have the next Hardy Falls book finished soon.
The usual disclaimers apply.
Oh! You might also be interested to know that, thanks to Kobo promotions for their romance free book page and Google Play being big internationally, as of today my books have been downloaded / purchased in at least 91 countries. I think that’s pretty cool. When I see countries listed that I didn’t even know WERE countries, and I realize someone there (or maybe even a few someones) is reading about Hardy Falls, or at the very least has the book on their e-reader…well. It’s something special.
So anyway, for those who care, that’s what’s been going on in my life at the moment. It’s really quite boring since I basically just sit at my desk and stare at a computer or out the window, but never fear! There’s always something right around the corner.
Just FYI – I’ll be sending out a special little story to the newsletter subscribers this Wednesday. I’ll let you guys know about it later, but if you want to join the newsletter and see for yourself, you can click HERE.
And I can’t tell you how much I appreciate all of your support. You guys are the best!!
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