Well...it just wasn't working. I hit
Chapter Seven, and pretty much bounced. The story was meandering too
much, taking too long to get anywhere...but must important of all,
the three plot arcs I was working on were just not dovetailing, and
that's pretty fatal. This has already had a first draft...well, I am
tonight declaring the 'second draft' completed, and will now start
work on the third. Bluntly, this isn't one story, it's three, and
while each of them individually is good, they do not improve as a
whole. The solution is obvious – pick the one I am most interested
in, and write it as a shorter book!
This has happened to me before. Though
the second and third books in the 'Battlecruiser Alamo' series were
two-draft, with the second being revisions and edits, nothing
fundamental, the first book, 'Price of Admiralty', went through four
complete drafts, the first three of which bore little resemblance –
other than some names – to the finished work. That occupied most of
a year, the last year I was at my old job. So...I was rather
expecting this to happen...
So...the counter is reset to zero, and
tomorrow or the next day – depending on how much more rethinking
time I need – I will start work on the third draft, this one to be
back down to 80k...which means, interesting, that despite the fact
that I'm writing off five days, I expect to have the book finished a
week or two earlier than I had originally planned! Essentially, what
I did was write down the bits of the story that were working up in my
head, and made sure they tangled together into a plot, and something
I am a lot happier with.
Spoilers? One tag line. 'Crusader State
on Celtic Greenland.'
No comments:
Post a Comment