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nym_wibblyEven whilst mucking about with various writing aids and their learning curves, I've made spectacular progress on the rewrite of A Bed of Thorns. The first seven chapters of the WIP version form the bulk of the first two chapters of 2.0. I've smoothed out the pacing, which in the early chapters basically meant adding more material and having fewer time-skips.
I'm finding it reasonably easy to make the changes I want to make, and to spot other possibilities as I go along. How long this relative ease lasts now that I'm back at my weekly class remains to be seen.
When I began writing 1.0, I built in escape roads along the way. I knew my health might not be up to the epic I wanted to write (and I wasn't expecting it to be anything like as epic as it turned out!). Up until chapter seventy-something, I always had a way to end the story within ten chapters if I really needed to. It would've been a shame, but it would've had an ending I could live with. I jumped off a cliff after that and aimed for the finish line, which is going to be somewhere between 800,000 and 1,000,000 words. Editing on this scale, I can smooth out those intentional kinks in the road a bit. They don't ruin the pacing completely, but they do potentially break the story into viable sub-sections. I might be able to use that as part of the new structure. I may even be able to work it so that I can jump some time later on and get myself a bit nearer to the ending without it looking like a cop-out. Meanwhile, I can gently weed out the escape-road setup that I littered through the first sixty chapters or so in case I needed to dive for the exit. Some of them add charming detail that I'm quite fond of, but they don't need to be there to move the story along. Plus, leaving them out will leave me more room to bring later canon details in.
Before starting work on the new chapter three, I have 37,000 words that I'm feeling good about. I'm moving at NaNoWriMo pace and it isn't (currently) killing me. Many of my biggest issues with A Bed of Thorns were contained in those first seven chapters, and now they're sorted. I can't tell you how good that feels.
I'm finding it reasonably easy to make the changes I want to make, and to spot other possibilities as I go along. How long this relative ease lasts now that I'm back at my weekly class remains to be seen.
When I began writing 1.0, I built in escape roads along the way. I knew my health might not be up to the epic I wanted to write (and I wasn't expecting it to be anything like as epic as it turned out!). Up until chapter seventy-something, I always had a way to end the story within ten chapters if I really needed to. It would've been a shame, but it would've had an ending I could live with. I jumped off a cliff after that and aimed for the finish line, which is going to be somewhere between 800,000 and 1,000,000 words. Editing on this scale, I can smooth out those intentional kinks in the road a bit. They don't ruin the pacing completely, but they do potentially break the story into viable sub-sections. I might be able to use that as part of the new structure. I may even be able to work it so that I can jump some time later on and get myself a bit nearer to the ending without it looking like a cop-out. Meanwhile, I can gently weed out the escape-road setup that I littered through the first sixty chapters or so in case I needed to dive for the exit. Some of them add charming detail that I'm quite fond of, but they don't need to be there to move the story along. Plus, leaving them out will leave me more room to bring later canon details in.
Before starting work on the new chapter three, I have 37,000 words that I'm feeling good about. I'm moving at NaNoWriMo pace and it isn't (currently) killing me. Many of my biggest issues with A Bed of Thorns were contained in those first seven chapters, and now they're sorted. I can't tell you how good that feels.
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Date: 10 Jan 2019 04:42 (UTC)