Drafting a New Novel

After I finished all my revisions and sent out all my requested materials, I had a huge chunk of free time. Gasp.

Ofc, I don’t like facing a giant blank day. No, I don’t. Even if it’s fun stuff, I want it on my to-do list.

And it’s fun stuff. This week, I’ve been getting back to my third book. The YA story I started in October (and drafted 25k words). But from November-April, I had to revert to revisions on my other two manuscripts for conferences.

So poor third book got shunted to the side. I always start a new project as soon as I complete the other manuscript. But I never complete the drafting in one pass.

Weirdly, this works well for me. Those first 130 pages sat around from November-April. And when I reread them last week, I realized plot points didn’t make sense, the order of things needed to be tweaked and certain subplots could be tossed out the window. Ah, the beauty of emotional distance. I also added more conflict and changed the villain around.

I also realized my original story concept was great but I no longer wanted the original ending. So I started drafting a synopsis so I could figure out where the story should end.

This week, I typed in all my edits and added a few new scenes. I’m now at 28K words. Next week, I plan to go back to my 1k a day drafting rule.

I’m excited to get back into this story, but it was a little rough switching gears. I’d just spent 8 weeks with my other novel. Which made these characters feel foreign. I felt clumsy writing them. But now I think I’m back in their world again.

So from Mid-April to early June, I plan to finish drafting this third novel. I’ll put it aside a month, then revise.

Ah back to self-imposed deadlines. How I missed you. 🙂