Back To Life

Still been doing too much goofing off. I’ve been doing this to avoid the hard work of breaking the draft down into separate, coherent storylines. At least, I combined my way too much TV and internet procrastination with revisiting the original works which inspired Book 1.

I worked through the Book 1 scene listing I made last week and came up with a vague order for most of them. Calling them scenes is a bit generous. Too many were written as scraps of dialogue or description to up my word count after the story ended way sooner than I thought it would.

I wrote the ~72K zero draft during NaNoWriMo 2016. The first 15K of the draft tells the main story from beginning to end. The remainder was a jumble of scraps to flesh out existing scenes and plots and new subplots along with anywhere from 15-20K of author notes and brainstorming. Being that it was NaNo, I avoided going back to edit anything I’d previously written. I wrote things as they came to me and largely out of order. Sometimes I put the bits in their own document, sometimes I didn’t. The one thing I didn’t do: put them approximately where they belonged.

The haphazard way I wrote the story (conceptually and technically) has made it a chore to integrate all the parts. The story originally took place over the course of about a night in a handful of locations. The additional bits of investigation and visiting other locales requires breaking apart the original scenes in both time and space to fix what goes where. Instead of drag-and-drop, I’m splitting and merging or cut-hunt-pasting. Things I sought to avoid when I switched from Word to Scrivener. This saps my motivation to revise.

And I’m going to this again for Book 2. Sigh.

I already plan on doing things differently for Book 3. I want to front load with an outline. I’ll also go over previously written scenes so I can put things where they belong. Even if I don’t come up with the bits in order. This way I can do it bit by bit and not get daunted by a mountain or reorganization on the back end.