In the past 31 days I have written THREE "The End"s. (Insert obligatory "I need a nap" Garfield image)
On October 31st, right before Nanowrimo started, I finished up Draft 2 of Bulletproof. I knew this draft had tons of problems, but I was also SO GLAD to be done with it. It needed help, but it wasn't something I could figure out on my own. So after a few days of panicking I bit the bullet and sent it out to my amazing beta readers. And their comments back so far have been AMAZING. Big changes are coming, but I feel like I have a plan for Draft 3. (How is this possible? Usually I'm SCRAMBLING to figure out what needs fixing, ready to rip a whole draft apart and rewrite everything... the short answer is, I don't know. Maybe it's that I'm getting better at drafting. Maybe it's that I spent almost a whole year on it, and so I've actually gotten more ironed out than I thought. Or maybe it's just kismet - magic - the muses decided to smile upon me!)
On November 30th, I wrote "The End" for Belmy & Orion. This is the space opera enemies-to-lovers story that I started working on last Nanowrimo. The 30,000ish words I added to this draft this year were not pretty. They definitely suffered from having a year gap in between. But they are words, and they are there. As the popular writing adage goes: You can't edit a blank page! So now I’ll let this draft sit… and see when I feel like dragging it out and editing the starlight out of it.
The surprise "The End" was the one I wrote December 5th (today!) for The Soul Menagerie. This is the story I’ve been affectionately calling Pokemon meets Hunger Games. I did not expect to finish this draft in November, nor this year. I thought it would languish half-written until I gave myself permission to finish it sometime in 2020. But instead, I decided to keep going, even though Nanowrimo was over. And I wanted to continue. At the end of November, I’d left the characters in the middle of the climax. After seeing how that had gone with Belmy & Orion, I thought I owed it to my main character Aidan to finish it. It's not perfect. It will need copious amounts of rewriting. But it's here, and it's ready to edit whenever I want to return to it. (Soon, probably… this one feels like a solid draft, the way Bulletproof did… excite!)
As I look at 2020 (with the hope that it will turn out EONS better than 2019), I'm setting my goals high. I might fail, but that's okay. Every step forward is progress, even if it feels like it's not.
So 2020 - Querying Bulletproof is at the top of this list. I hope I can finish Draft 3 by June, or at least by the LATEST August, when the next Pitch Wars will happen.
I need to finish the first 20 pages for a critique I signed up for at a Boston convention - a different one from the one I’ve been attending for the last three years. This one is much more writing focused, whereas Boskone is more about fandom. Both have their purposes, and I’m looking forward to both conventions.
Then in between/ after Pitch Wars… Let the querying commence.
For now, I’m going to sit back on my laurels for a day or two… sipping some well-earned hot chocolate… and then jump eagerly into the next project.
