So, I’ve spent the last three weeks writing a very tropey, self-indulgent fantasy romance novelette on my phone, purely to entertain myself and a few of my friends. It is 17,000 words, written in second person present tense, and objectively bad–and I don’t care!
I haven’t had the energy to work on any of the projects whose quality I do care about, because seasonal depression has officially smacked me (don’t worry, I’m fine, I’m just perpetually exhausted which is very annoying), but playing with this thing has kept me writing 800-1000 words per day. Even sloppy words are words ^^
I won’t talk too much about that project, because it’s not something I ever plan on releasing–and if I ever did release something like that, it would be under a different name. Even PG-13 “sweet” romance is an adult genre, and this blog and name are for middle grade and young adult fiction.
Back to Melody, then, and more relevant projects.
I finally finished the draft!
Yes, MMPC’s first draft is done. It’s 65,000 words (including all my notes-to-self). How long will the editing process take? Who knows. I have some experience with editing from when I was a teenager, but it’s been years–and to be honest, I usually just retooled the prose. Which did improve my novels! But there’s more to editing than that.
What I’d really like to do is print the whole thing off, drive out somewhere no one can hear me, and read the entire draft aloud and take notes. But the wind chill outside is currently -17F… I think I’ll put that off for a minute, lol.
One thing I’d like to be able to do better is outline my works. Right now I tend to struggle with figuring out what happens next while I’m drafting, and outliners don’t seem to have that problem. Maybe reverse engineering an outline from this draft might help?
Oh, and then there are all those editing notes I wrote while drafting. I’ve completely forgotten what those are about. Probably a good thing I wrote them down, huh?
Honestly, I’ll probably binge through a bunch of the relevant Writing Excuses podcasts (again) and see if they can offer me some kind of structure for how to go about this. I don’t need to do anything drastic like cutting a character or getting rid of an entire subplot, because I don’t have many characters and I don’t think there’s anything that counts as a subplot. There’s a thread of the main plot that I know I’ve underused, though.
That’s all for now. I’m looking forward to reading this book! I don’t really remember how most of it goes by now xD
Wordfully yours,
-Jade