In Which Our Author Begins Again, and Our Heroine is a Cuckoo Among Finches
Project Title: The Mistress of Frosthaven
Genre: YA – Dark Fantasy
Words Today: 1079
Running Total: 1079
Scrap Draft: 6,453 + Version One: 24,689
So…that happened. Did some brainstorming over the weekend and ended up spending about four hours last night (until 12:30am, actually), writing a fairly extensive outline to replace pretty much 90% of everything that I’ve already written up to this point. That’s the bad news. The good news? I’m actually way more excited about my main character in this new version, even though it required a massive reworking of her backstory (which is why almost everything that comes before is…mostly irrelevant now). Some of the existing Version 1.0 will survive the change-over, and be much the better for it. And I certainly couldn’t have figured out what I really wanted to do with these characters without writing 1.0, so…all in all, meh. It is what it is. I weighed the options of just continuing on the course I’d already set, but last night’s mara-plot-athon pretty much clinched it for me. If I’m excited enough about the idea to lose track of four hours, yeah, that’s worth it to pursue. It’d only be harder later if I kept chugging away and had to throw even more of it out.
Still…ouch. A month’s work sidelined. Still, at least now I definitely know how to get to midpoint and beyond, which is great. No more gaping holes of “what happens here, exactly?” And tonight’s work…solid. I’m not 100% sold on the voice just yet, but I’ll come back to it tomorrow and see how I feel. I definitely like the tone better: it’s darker, more mysterious, and definitely feels richer. I can tell, though, that I’ve switched over from underwriting (the “ah, I’ll figure out the worldbuilding later” version) to definitely detail-oriented overwriting. But in the end, I know I can cut words. That comes later. Right now, I just have ground to recover.
Maggie Slater 