February 23, 2022
Week 72
Emotional State: Burning Down the House
Books & Writing
It’s been a frustrating week. The book edits are moving forward. I’ve actually finished editing book two for the second time and now am doing the more important work of analyzing each scene to see if it needs to be there or not.
When you pants a book and have no clue what is supposed to be happening, let alone the character themes or arcs you want to capture, you end up with things all over the place. I thought I’d handled them in edit round 1, but apparently not. Or at least not well enough.
And so, I sprinted to the last chapters, decided not to edit them right now (they’re in relatively good shape), while I dig deep and figure out just exactly what I want this book to be about. I’ve got some good stuff here, but I am struggling with the larger themes, because they overlap and there are two people who are growing (or not!) in this book.
When you add in series arc (all nine books), or first trilogy arc (books 1 – 3), it suddenly adds a lot of complications. You can’t cut off any avenues for later books, but also need to plant the necessary seeds for the arcs to grow. Oh, and I’m not just talking about plot, but character arcs and growth too. So yeah. It’s been fun… if tricky.
I know it’ll be hard, but not as hard, when I get to books 4 -6 because I’ll have figured out my process. I hope.
Website Crashes, an Old website Dies
The larger frustration for me was the website. I’ve spent about three weeks chipping away at the new pages. Playing around with copy, images, formatting, order until I got it just right. And then I tried to launch it and…
Kablooey.
My site disappeared. Bluehost didn’t show it existing and when you visited the URL, the domain wanted you to create a site for it. Um, no. No, I’m not redoing all of my posts and starting over, thank you very much.
I reached out to Bluehost, and at first, they blamed me. Now, had I done something stupid, I would’ve eaten it and asked them to help me. But I didn’t. I used their staging site capabilities and backed it all up before I launched it. Their product broke it, not mine.
After the first guy gave up, they created an escalated ticket and another human – two days later! – got back to me and said it was my plugins, and that he fixed it.
Uh, nope.
Instead of no site, I got a bunch of error messages, which was worse. Instead, I decided to go nuclear. I had backed the site up before I killed it and thought rather than start with broken parts and bad data tables, I’ll just start over. So, that’s what I did. My site is old yet new. And then I went about redoing all the new redesigned pages. Again.
Is it as good as it was? No. I wasn’t really feeling the need to kill myself again on pages I’d already created once that were now toast. Is it better than my original site? I think so.
At the end of the day, isn’t that the only thing that matters?
(Did you catch the song lyrics in the section header?)