March 2, 2022
Week 73
Emotional State: Bootstrapping my Way Through Revisions
Books & Writing
Alright. Book Two is now at a state I wish it had been a month ago, but that’s neither here nor there. I have done the thing – analyzed the crap out of it. Mapped it out in spreadsheets. Tagged every scene with metadata. Peeled the scenes apart and refined the tags some more.
Then, I read the rough draft of Book Three again – at least the beginning – to ensure my endings and beginnings worked and all the necessary pieces were set in place for Book Two. And I discovered something that was both good and seriously bad.
Book Three is really good. Like sit down to read a chapter or two and end up reading the whole thing good. Does it need work? Absolutely. But will it require the same level of editing as Book Two? No, I don’t think so.
And that put me in a bad spot. Book Two has to be as good as Book Three, or as close as I can get it, or readers won’t read the beautiful thing I wrote as a rough draft. So, back to the drawing board I went.
The first thing I did was to get rid of any preconceived moments or beats. I needed to think of this book fresh, without trying to jam in scenes that I’d written. It also freed me up to think outside of the box a bit more. Then, I journaled what the journey for each character was, what I was trying to do and where they needed to be for Book Three to work.
The main issue I had with the rough draft of Book Two (besides all of it) was the character arcs for both Seraphina and Angwyndith. I had too much crammed in to an already full story, so simplification and better choices needed to be made. Now a heck of a lot clearer, I sat down with my spreadsheet and got to work.
What I ended up with was redoing most of Act 1 – not all – but most. I’m moving the catalyst from Book Two to Book Three for a few reasons. One: I wanted it completed in the first mini trilogy of the series, where I’m capping off Seraphina’s family issues; two: I needed to pull more of the world building to the front of the book, since that is a better place for it (according to the experts); and, three: Book Three’s catalyst wasn’t strong enough and this scene ties in perfectly to what’s explored in it.
I’ve created a new catalyst, which I have to write from scratch. I also have a few new scenes or moments to write and a bunch of scenes to rewrite to flow with the new outline. And, I moved some pieces up, some down, removed others and combined even more than that. What I think I have works… I hope.
Now I just need to write and revise it again, and then revise the newer pieces a few more times to get them as polished as the rest of the book will hopefully be after four revisions. (Ha!). I had already built in plenty of time into my publishing schedule for this book to figure out the pieces of self-publishing I didn’t know and to give myself room for drama, so it’s going to work out fine.
But lesson learned. Don’t go into writing a book without at least nailing down my themes and writing them in batches so I have time to fix inconsistencies and changes that happen in the writing process. For books 4 – 6, each of them will be drafted before any of them are published and the same goes for books 7 – 9 (if I can figure out how to end this the way I want).
I only hope I don’t struggle with the beginning of Book Two as much as I did on Book One. I don’t know if I can face it if I do.
Who am I kidding? Of course I can. I’m a Gen Xer, bootstraps and all.