Calling a Mulligan (Sort Of).

Update 14 6-12 Sept 2021

Yeah, I hemmed and hawed for two weeks and then started a new project and re-outlined the novel for the second time. Luckily, the last half of the book didn’t require a lot of changes, just a few extra chapters and changes.

But it is done. The new cover photo shows the new outline.

The funny thing was that I created several major changes, and yet in the end the outline only lost 2 chapters overall.

The Rough Cuts

The first thing I decided to do was to cut out all of the “Villain Povs.”

These chapters were originally planned to show things going on behind the scenes and meant to be short. But as I wrote the first few of them, they developed into full character POVs and grew longer and longer.

My answer to this was to take the bulk of this information and put into three “interludes” in the book. These interludes would be kept short as the stories would be told by my prologue storyteller. I then took the rest of the information and cut it into Epigraphs that will start many of the chapters.

Using epigraphs is experimental for me. I really think it could be a lot of fun, plus I know a LOT of readers tend to skip them. I used to be one of them. I really look forward to a future where my readers complain about the fact that they didn’t understand things because they skipped all of the epigraphs.

Second Major Change

I broke my POV rules.

As much as I really enjoyed the limited POV and the restrictions in my chapters, at times it was very obnoxious trying to show things from different angles, but then arguing whether or not the pov character had a line on that event. I will still stay only in a single head or following limited characters in each chapter, but this should give me greater flexibility and allow me to get more information into each chapter.

Right now, I have chapters that have a lot of the same information repeated so that I can have each POV character process that information. It’s a lot of wasted words and space in the book.

The other thing I did with my POV changes is I made sure that the MAIN story of the book has more weight, adding in extra chapters for those characters.

Word Count

So, I only have my prologue done right now, and the new manuscript sits at 3000 words. (About). I have been hesitant to get started. Let me explain.

When I redraft things, I have a habit of copying and pasting as much of the old material as I can. No reason to throw out all of the old words. But right now, I keep thinking that I should start wholly fresh. And when I first start a book fresh, I have to beat myself up and force myself to get to the keys. I go kicking and screaming all the way to keyboard, and then once I start writing I never want to stop. Seriously it is kind of funny but it happens ALL the time.

Other Works/ Goals

This week saw another agent query go out.

I’m super excited about that. One of my top-of-list agents opened up and I sent the letter out. I only wish she would have allowed a synopsis to be sent with it. I’m pretty proud of my one-page synopsis. It was a terror to write and went through five heavily workshopped iterations.

Oh, well. We’ll see what happens. I might just get a simple rejection in less than 2 days… which is what happened with one of my previous three letters sent out.

Gaming Blogs/Journals

Several posts back I talked about writing journals for one of the two characters I am playing each week. I wanted to wait to get a bunch of games under my belt before I decided which character to talk about and showcase.

This was in lieu of doing the Curse of Strahd posts as that game is happening (almost) monthly… but has had a lot of stumbling blocks.

I still really want to do these posts for all of you. But the problem is writing the novel (which yes, I did just throw out 70,000 words), recording the podcast, and painting. It’s a lot on the plate and I have to juggle that with the day job.

Not really making excuses as I’m just laying out the time management. Got to make my choices on what to prioritize.

The worse thing is I have a bunch of other things I want to work on right as well.

I really want to get some short stories written in my fantasy world. I’d like to get some horror shorts written as well. I haven’t written short stories in close to a decade.

I’d like to rewrite the first Keegan and Slater story, Keegan’s Last Stand with my current level of skill and with the changes to my style, and POV, and just retconned history.

Scenarios. I really want to write some scenarios and see if I can learn to format them for online sales. Probably some Call of Cthulhu stuff. Though I am horribly out of date and suck at setting up the proper format for an ebook. That is outside my normal skill range, but I’d love to learn it and get it out there.

Anyway, this is another short post. Thank you for reading, and staying with my journal. Hopefully this helps other authors dealing with their problems. I’m messed up and I still keep trying to do it. Maybe this inspires you to keep doing it as well.