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Fall writing update - 2

When I last wrote in September I was working on a zero draft of the Wedding Crown, getting my Monster Girls ready for Pitchwars, and trying to find any sort of enthusiasm for my Brigadoon re-write. 

I ended up giving up on Brigadoon. At least for now, the story just wasn't sitting well with me. Maybe I tried to push too many drafts too soon. Instead, I focused on the Monster Girls. I did one full pass of the manuscript, cleaning up the emotional details, making sure the tone was as consistent as I could get it. I felt pretty good about it going into the Pitchwars submission. 

Then I spent a weekend hard-core workshopping the first chapter and query with my writing group. And the effort was worth it! I ended up getting one request for a partial, which I was thrilled by. That was my goal this year--if I could get at least a request, I would be happy. That ended up being as far as I went--and for good reason. After the extensive workshopping, I re-read my next few chapters before I sent them in, and...found them lacking. My characters were passively existing in their worlds, without any real goals or choices of their own. It was a little heartbreaking, to recognize that in my own "finished" pages, but I am so grateful to my writing group and to the Pitchwars process, because I learned so much in that last weekend before the submission. Those lessons, the higher standards I'm holding my writing to--I get to carry that forward. 

I spent October outlining and re-outlining the Wedding Crown, which was my 20kin5days project from early September. I started by taking my outline from my zero draft, moving it to excel to analyze the plot threads, and then writing out scene summaries by hand in my notebook. Then I retyped them into a scrivener outline--and dove into writing for Nano. 

My goal for Nano was to write 50,000 words, and to make them good words. My goal was to take what I learned in the last week leading up to Pitchwars to write a half a novel full of scenes that I could be proud of.

That didn't happen.

Instead, I wrote 78,000 words. I finished the book. And I don't hate it. In fact, I still have ideas swimming through my head--scenes to add, scenes to cut, places to explore and character arcs to improve. And while there are definitely places where I rushed for the sake of the word count, there are also passages that I'm really proud of. So even though this isn't the end yet, and I'm nowhere ready to share this, I'm still energized by this story, and think I can carry this further. 

My goal for December is to work out an updated outline--to flesh out those missing scenes, and actually pull out the darlings that are getting trashed--and to try some writing without purpose. I bought a craft book that has a lot of writing exercises in it, so I'm planning to spend the month using some of my not-so-good scenes to play with those exercises, and see if I can be in a better place by January. If I still have energy for this project at that point, then I'll try again during the Winter Writing Festival to write a good book that I would want to share. 

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