The last two weeks have gone well. I finished up the revision pass of The Law of the Prince Charming, adding in the new plot lines I decided I needed after receiving feedback from an editor. That ended up going a lot more smoothly than I thought it would, and I’m happy with the way it ended up.
A side effect of this, however, sent the first 13k words of the Huntsman into the trash. This was both good and bad. It was good because it highlighted that a certain plot-line was superfluous and probably would’ve just confused things. I was also really having trouble with the end of that section and I’d just as rather not have to fix it. Losing the beginning of the Huntsman was bad because …well throwing away 13k words, and I actually really liked how it started the story. It gave legit reasons to explain what had happened in the last book without it just being the narrator telling the reader. I also loved a lot of the characterization I did with my main characters that, as a discovery writer, I’ll have to see if I can finesse into the new beginning.
And speaking of the new beginning, I was inspired by the DIY MFA Radio podcast to start trying to write every day. Not that I don’t, but I mean to actually write new prose every day. For some reason I assumed that if I was going to write new prose, it had to be as much as I possibly could manage in a day. And that would mean revising and working on my website would be left as daunting side projects. It was pointed out that even 100 words a day is 36.5k a year, nothing mind blowing, but I realized that it would be child’s play for me to write 500 words a day. That’s 30 min, 45 on a bad day. So I just make that a daily thing and that’s over 180k words a year.
As of right now I’m using that to rewrite the beginning of the Huntsman (the rest of the story was not much effected by the beginning being changed, which was part of the problem.) and I’ve also been throwing the occasional 500 words at a new story idea that’s been burning a hole in my brain. So for the most part, December is an experiment of whether I can polish a novel, write prose into a second novel that is on the edge of stepping out of rough draft status, and write prose toward a different project’s rough draft all that the same time. Sounds like a lot of fun doesn’t it? I know right!? So far I’m not having any trouble switching among them. My plan now is to see what happens and reevaluate at the end of the month.
You can do it- Sounds like a productive period in your life.