New Novel Madness - Picking a new project

As a writer, there is nothing more awesome than finishing a novel. Recently, I completed the first draft of the last book of The Corpus Chronicles and am currently editing. If you haven't written a series before, take that amazing end-of-book feeling and multiply it by 1000. Seeing the last book printed out on my desk in physical form rather than on my computer screen was the most surreal thing I had ever experienced. My entire indie-author journey up to that point had been The Corpus Chronicles. The series had been my blood, sweat, and tears for the last two years. No matter what I was doing for all that time, the series was always, without fail, at the back of my mind. And then, suddenly, it was over.

Of course, I still have plenty of editing to get through, along with beta reading and cover art, but for the most part, the heavy-lifting is complete. I'm no longer expending the majority of my energy each day into pushing the characters to grow and evolve, in structuring the outlines of subplots and backstories, and putting down one new word in front of the other. In short, I'm no longer building anything new. Instead, all my time is going to marketing The Corpus Chronicles, reviewing new and awesome books from other indie authors, and my very (cough) studious student life.

However, as someone with a deep love for writing, without that building component, something feels horribly off. I've heard from others that this is something many people experience after finishing a major project, but for me it is a first. Before The Corpus Chronicles, the only books I wrote were for fun rather than publication. The stakes were much lower back then, and consequently, so was the mental blowback after finishing a project.

After finishing The Corpus Chronicles, everything in my life was thrown off, from my normal mental state of mulling over plot ideas to my daily schedule. My natural solution was to dive right into a new project. However, it proved to be much more difficult than I had imagined. Usually, my mind is constantly swimming with new plot ideas, and while I was writing The Corpus Chronicles, they came up so frequently that I came to resent the project I had chosen for its length and the consequent time commitment, and I was eager to finish. I wrote down all the brainstorms in a notebook when the ideas came and continued my work on The Corpus Chronicles.

After I finished the last book, I went back to that notebook and leafed through it. I picked one idea, wrote maybe a vague outline or a few pages, and then hopscotched to another, and then another... you get the picture. Nothing was grabbing me, and now that I had the time to write a new book, the new ideas stopped coming. Trying to force them was as agonizing as not doing anything at all. I read through article after article online on writing inspiration. I tried to think back to how I got the idea for The Corpus Chronicles. It was just like everything else I'd written thus far: It had just popped into my head one day and evolved into something feasible with time and patience.

So where was the disconnect? I had plenty of ideas in my notebook, but for some reason, I couldn't get them to grow. I also wasn't getting any new ideas for the first time in my memory, and I believe the two phenomenon were closely related. Maybe it's just a symptom of the postpartum depression us writers get after we finish projects, or maybe the mental block is stemming from somewhere completely different in my life. I don't think I'll end up figuring out what it is exactly. Maybe the only way is to keep working through the last book's editing and wait for that elusive little spark of inspiration to ignite. It certainly can't be forced.

Until next time.
-Your friendly neighborhood coffee zombie

Finishing with a Bang - Writing the end of a book

You have slaved over your first draft for months, maybe even years. You've written, reworked, deleted, and modified until your fingers fell off. The moment has arrived. You're in the homestretch, on those last few chapters. The light at the end of the tunnel is calling out to you along with a hundred more clichés. And then, if you're anything like me, you find yourself suck. Even though you've seen your perfect ending in your head for the entire process, you find yourself stuck, unable to get that last jumble of sentences down on the page.

Why is this? I have no idea. When I wrote EOA, I rushed the ending to the ending and in the process, butchered it so badly that it took me nearly a month of editing just to sort out that mush of chapters I left in my wake. This has been a problem for me with past manuscripts as well, so when I approached the end of book 2, I gave myself a stern talking to that boiled down to "never again".

So, in order to prevent another disaster, I've been taking the end of book 2 slow. In fact, maybe even too slow. I don't want to confuse this with the lack of writing, because that is not the problem I have created for myself. It seems every time I finish a chapter, I add another onto my storyboard. I have had five chapters left for almost two months now, although I have still made significant progress.

Looking from the ends of two extremes, I wonder if there is truly a way to find that perfect strategy. Some authors write the endings first and wear by it, but for me my ideas tend to shift as I write the story, and my initial plans never seem to be what I end up with at the end. Ideas work in fluid motion, and the thought of stapling them down to a specific manner of ending, whether through writing it first or a strict storyboard seems absolutely unappealing to me.

Although I hate how much the ending of book 2 has deviated me from my schedule, writing isn't something that can be forced. It can't be forced short without making a major mess as it has in my past and it can't be forced to conform to a specific plan. I have learned that, in my case at least, attempting this is wildly hypocritical. There are no shortcuts, no magic pills. A book will take the course it pleases. No exceptions.