I realized the other day that it had been a while since I'd done a work in progress update, and thought it was probably time. So, here goes:
The King's Falcon (fantasy) -I finished editing in the wake of Dave Farland/ Wolverton's suggestions from his Novel ReWriting Workshop. One of my challenges on this one was that I needed to pull a plot line that hadn't started until after page 100 into the first fifty pages and blend it into the story structure better. Fingers crossed that I did this well since this story is currently out with an editor for review.
New Bohemia: Just One Night (Romance). The first draft is saved. I had a heart attack moment a while ago when I was posting this story in 1,000 word chunks to one of my writing groups. I hadn't realized that Word was pulling up the file from the remote backup device. So, when it opened on the screen the story only had 50,000 words rather than the 105,000 it should have had. Panic set in. About 20 minutes later I realized my mistake. Hands shaking, I saved a backup of the file and closed the computer for the night. I haven't looked at this one in six weeks so it's about time to start edits.
Schrodinger Effect (Urban Fantasy Thriller). A wise friend, Lisa Scottoline, once said the difference between a murder mystery a thriller is in murder mystery someone is dead when the story starts, and in a thriller, someone dies after the narrative starts. By that definition, this WIP qualifies as a thriller. I tried picking at this story without the color wheel done, but kept having to stop to figure out the emotional resonance of what Vonna was seeing. So, I've finally finished my emotion color wheel, and outline. Now if I can keep the cat off my magnetic white board (although she's done some interesting things rearranging my outline), I should be able to get this one written. I'm about 5,000 words into it and so far so good.
Thanks for stopping by.
2 comments:
Wow, three WIPs at once? Impressive! And yikes, I absolutely hate heart attack moments like the one you experienced with New Bohemia. Thank goodness you hadn't lost all those words!
Heather, At least they are all in different stages of the process. It works for me.
I lost the complete manuscript to King's Falcon a while back when my computer crashed. I hired a tech to try to retrieve bits and pieces of it. He "found" a good chunk, but I had to essentially rewrite the whole thing. So, I've been reasonably good about keeping backups ever since. "Losing" half of New Bohemia was unhinging because (of course) my backup only had half of it too. I'm ashamed to admit how long it took me to figure out what I was doing wrong. :)
The moral of this story: Save often; back up often, and make sure you're looking at the right file BEFORE having a heart attack.
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