Rewrites Underway

Update Time! First of all, back from Canada. (After two trips.) Came back the first time after about 2.5 weeks. Got almost all of the house painted except for some spots that require taller ladders than we had available (and where I had to wash off wallpaper). On a related note, whoever decided wallpaper and popcorn ceilings needed to be a thing can go die in a fire. Non-Negotiable.

The second trip to Canada included the birth of my niece (YAY!) and helping my sister while she recovered from her c-section. (Stairs. So many stairs.) Got back mid-January from that one.

Been slumming with Netflix ever since. (Until recently when I decided the house needed a good clean. It's going to take me a while before I get the whole thing where I want it, but at least the office is done.)

Okay, now that the Life Update is done, let's get into some Writing Updates.

First of all, I did not finish my NaNo novel, Death Wish. As is prone to happen, I became less interested in it upon my return from Canada.

I've also not yet pursued editing of Believe Everything as none of the people I'd asked to read the rewrite have gotten back to me. (Shameless guilt trip is shameless.)

That said, I was not completely idle. I'm not sure what it was, but something inspired me to get back into working on another novel I'd started but have not yet finished. As one of the few books that I have a half-baked outline for, it suffers greatly from me losing interest. (I don't know what it is about outlines, but it's like if I know how we get to the ending, then I have less interest in actually writing it.) Which has somewhat happened again, but only because another project called to me.

Way back when I first began this blog (November of 2015, in case you were wondering) I mentioned that I was beginning NaNoWriMo with a project I was really looking forward to. At that time, I was careful about naming it. (Still not going to do it now, because I want a blog post completely dedicated to it. With loads of insider information.)

Well, if you kept up with the blog posts from late 2015 throughout 2016, you'll notice that I actually did a really fun thing with that project: I wrote all 4 parts in under a year. In a previous post, I gave a rough timeline of my writing schedule as of May 2016. Overall, the series was finished by September 2016. That was a full 175,307 words in a 377 page google doc that broke the mobile app. (Yup, still proud of that.)

That being said, the series was done and I set it aside. While I was writing, however, I made notes on a Revision List for the day that I would finally pick it back up. Well, that day finally arrived. On February 16, 2020, I started the rewrite of Part 1.

There were a lot of factors that led me to doing the rewrite, but most of it came down to it being time. I loved the original, I knew what I could make better, and the music I've come across lately has just pointed me to it.

Another major factor is marketability. While I love BE to death, it's a weird sub-genre of Fantasy that I've never had the luxury of reading before. (Not to say it doesn't exist; only that I haven't been able to find it.) The genre of this series is straight YA Fantasy. It can be packaged and sold just like that. While it seems like a sad consideration to make on the part of BE, it's also a smart business decision. So I've made it, and now I intend to crank out these rewrites in the same record timing as their initial inception. (I hope; but I'm slow with rewrites.) After that, time to start hitting up agents and publishing houses.

There, now we're all caught up again. Now I have to get back to actually writing this thing. (So far I'm averaging about a chapter every 1.5 days. Gonna try and bump that.)