Old Manuscript Revival - Beginning the editing frenzy

Lately, I've hit a stonewall while writing The Corpus Chronicles book 2. I've spent almost two weeks working on the same chapter, when I usually knock out one/two on a good writing day. It is an exceptionally long, intense chapter, so I knew going in it wouldn't be easy. I expected it to be slow. However, I didn't realize the mindset it would leave me in. Now that I'm coming up on week three with only 3k words written, I'm finding myself dreading my writing time and doing anything to avoid it. I've done laundry far to many times, taken much longer than I should have to make myself lunches, and spent countless extra hours marketing EOA. But by far, most of my time has been sucked away staring at my computer screen, reading through what I've already written over and over again.

After another day of brain-numbing staring, I decided that what I need is a break from The Corpus Chronicles. I love the series, but it has held me hostage since last fall, and I've realized that it is time for me to change things up a bit. I thought about starting a new project, but once I get going with a project, it is extremely hard for me to stop (which is why The Corpus Chronicles has taken over my life), and I do have to get back to book 2 eventually. When deciding what to do, I remembered that through the last few days, I found my mind drifting back to an old manuscript I wrote about two years ago and shelved. If you are a frequent reader of my blog, I wrote about an old laptop that was stolen - this manuscript's fresh new shiny revised draft was on that computer and all I had on my backup drive was a monstrous rough version. A few minutes ago, I printed off that rusty old thing.

It doesn't look so scary there, but I assure you it is. As my new pet project/Corpus Chronicles vacation, I'm planning on reviving it over the next few days to get into publishing order (once I get there, I'll decide whether or not to publish it... first things first). I'm going to write a blog post for each revision day to show the process and to keep me on track. 

We'll see what happens together. Fingers crossed.

-Esha

Camp NaNo ending thoughts

This year was my first time doing Camp NaNo. I have done the main NaNoWriMo once, two years ago, and wrote most of a sci-fi book that I haven't worked on since. This time, I was using NaNo to try and finish my first draft of book 2. I already had a big chunk written going into NaNo, so reaching my word count goal should not have been a problem, considering that I already had my entire plot outlined chapter by chapter. But, as a pretty picture of a stack of freshly printed paper hasn't popped along my twitter feed, you can probably guess that I did not. 

When I did NaNo the first time, I reached and surpassed my set word count goal, which was about the same as what I set for book 2. The main difference I felt while writing the two stories was that the first time, when I was writing the sci-fi book, I liked the idea of being a published author some day in the future, but I wasn't writing said manuscript for the purpose of publishing it one day. I loved writing, I had a few friends that were doing NaNo, and I went along for the ride. When I began, I didn't have any sort of outline and made it up as I went (which was all fun and games until I realized that I had fifty pages of useless scenes and got my outlining act together). 

The biggest difference was that when I wrote that book two years ago, I was writing for me instead of focusing on writing for an audience. That was both a good and a bad thing. Yes, I was a lot less insecure about how my words would be received and that allowed for me to explore ideas with a lot less restraint. But that also had a flip side. Because I wasn't concerned about presenting that manuscript to a reader, the story got away from me and chunks of it were not well thought out/just plain sloppy. 

While working on book 2, I didn't have the same problems as I had a clear picture in my head of where the plot was going. However, I had EOA already published. I was receiving both positive and negative feedback on it, and not nearly as many reviews as I had hoped for, despite the endless lists of reviewers I had contacted. I found myself wishing that I had either tried harder to traditionally publish or not published at all. All of my frustrations with marketing EOA translated into fear while writing book 2, specifically the fear of my books vanishing into obscurity, and that fear turned into writer's block.

Camp NaNo helped with that fear a lot, and for the first two weeks, I wrote until my hands fell off. I had awesome cabin mates for encouragement and, when needed, friendly competition, and I more than doubled my starting word count. However, the fear got the better of me during the second two weeks and I fell off the wagon, creeping towards my word goal at a snail's pace. I ended NaNo with a handful of chapters left to write, so hopefully the wait for book 2 will only be a few more months, depending on how the writing goes from here on out. 

Anyways, little Smudge doesn't seem stressed. I shouldn't be either :)

He's practically mastered meditation. I could learn a lot from him.

(Of course, right after I type that he runs outside for an endless barking frenzy...)

-Esha

Why I love outlining and also why I shelved an old manuscript

I know some writers love writing organically and swear by it, but in my experience, all it leads to is a giant, incoherent mess. I wrote my first manuscript (which I shelved) organically. I thought out the main points of the story ahead of time and had that big picture in my head as I wrote it, and I was absolutely in love with the characters and plot. I worked at it for six months, bleeding my brain dry, until that amazing moment when I was able to put down the last sentence. I printed out the monstrosity and let it sit on my desk for two weeks, proudly reveling in my creation. After I had had enough time to sit with it, I picked it up again and read through it. 

Here is what I realized: the plot, while still awesome, was full of hundreds of little moving parts that, instead of forming a working machine, looked more like a pile of scrap metal. The beginning and middle were slow and dragged on for an eternity. One of the character's name changed halfway through (oops). The ending was incredibly rushed (probably because of coffee-fueled excitement on those last few days). The reader got slapped with a crisis, deaths, and other craziness without any time to breath. 

Of course, first drafts are meant to be thrown out, so I got to the revisions. I went through packs of red pens and reams of paper as I hacked away at my manuscript, draft after draft. And when I was finished: It was good. It wasn't great. It was adequately paced and the different elements were more in sync with each other. It was an enormous step from where I began, but it was still very far from where I wanted it to be. I had a choice - keep going with that manuscript that I was starting to lose faith in, or move on to a new project, let things stew, and revisit it later.

I decided that I wanted to keep going, even though the smart move probably would have been to move on. Then my laptop got stolen. I was on draft ten or eleven and the last draft I had backed up was five. Guys - back everything up. I cannot even begin to describe how insanely devastated I was. But, to put a positive spin on it, maybe that was the push I needed to put that manuscript to the side and get on with something else.

I had my first idea for EOA (which was wayyy different to the version that went to print) and I started jotting some stuff down. I didn't go into it with the intention to outline, but I did just to organize the story better in my head. Because of this, I feel I was able to allow for the evolution of the ideas I had without going through rewrites. The point to which my rough draft of EOA got to was the level that my old manuscript wasn't able to reach until seven or eight drafts in. 

Nevertheless, EOA needed a lot more work, but it was a much more enjoyable process than with my other novel because the entire time I was writing, I had a clear map of where I was going. I outlined book 2 during my revision process and was able to add in little bits of foreshadowing and questions, the resolutions to which I'm cranking out now. 

Okay, last bit about outlining - when I get stuck on one chapter, I can just hop over to another! When you outline a story ahead of time, it is a lot harder for you to get roped in by writer's block, as there should be a chapter for any emotion you might be feeling on a particular day.

So that's my advice. It's definitely not a formula, so keep an open mind and be willing to give different methods a try and do what works best for you. Also, shelving a manuscript is not the same as giving up. You can always revisit it at any time, or pull from it to add to a new story. It is not wasted time. You learn with every sentence you write. I could not have written EOA without everything I learned from my previous manuscript. And maybe, once I'm finished with the Corpus Chronicles, I'll come back to that old story with fresh eyes and more experience and pull all those loose ends together.

-Esha