So, week three. I feel a lot better about my progress this week. I got a lot done and I even wrote a completely new scene that I am super happy with.
That being said, I’m not where I was ‘planning’ to be. I’m in the last scene of the fifth folder (out of 11) after three weeks. Fairly positive that I’m going to have to push back my timeline, but then that’s the point of this whole process isn’t it? To figure out what’s going to work for me. Five weeks to revise plot and story might not be enough.
I remain hopeful that this will be most of the heavy lifting. I am filling in holes, smoothing it out some, and leaving some to be smoothed out later. I keep picturing it as a lump of dough I am rolling out flat, and I keep having to pull out chunks and then put in other chunks which then need to be rolled down into those places and will eventually fit in seamlessly. Right now the dough is still really lumpy.
The next folder contains the halfway point and is one of my favorite scenes, so I am looking forward to finishing this folder, and moving onto that one. Yay romance! Oops …spoilers.
I have had an ‘AhHA Moment’, as Gabriela likes to call them. My main character. Tabitha started out a lot like me, because …well I’m me, and so that’s what I’m familiar with, and as I’ve been doing this revision I’ve been able to feel her shoving me away and telling me exactly who she is in the space of this story. While I am a very quiet, non-aggressive, go with the flow sort of person, she kept having these scenes where she would ignore the advice of others, go out and act on assumptions, or order people around on her own whims. I think because of the highly sped up timeline of creating and revising this story, it has allowed me to actually feel the character developing, as opposed to my older stories where I have worked on them over years, and the characters developed gradually.
It is a brand new experience as a writer, and it’s super exciting for me, because I keep wanting to see what she’ll do next.
