My daughter is at camp this week. It is a day camp, and it is about 40 minutes from my house. Which means I am driving 2 hours and 40 minutes a day, 112 miles a day. It also means early rising and long days.
It also means a quiet house and writing time.
I have taken this opportunity to return to my YA scifi novel Veritas, which I had left in mid-revision when the pandemic hit and life became too stressful for me to have the proper mindset to work.
I spent Monday and Tuesday reviewing my copious notes and re-reading the rewrite as far as I had it. I remembered what I was trying to do, and where I was headed. Even more exciting, I liked the rewrite so far!
On Wednesday I dove back into the writing, managing a respectable 1,146 words on a brand new scene. My next step will be to return to the already written scenes and revise them to fit the new vision.
So while I may be a bit sleep-deprived, I am feeling good that I am making progress. This revision is a slow and painstaking one, as I measure each scene against feedback from my editor, the ideas found in Lisa Cron’s Story Genius, and the vision I have in my head. Weaving those parts together—and writing new material as needed—will hopefully create a story that is strong and compelling.
Vertias has been a project for a long time. This is my third major rewrite of the book. The first version I liked but a potential agent didn’t. I rewrote based on her feedback but disliked the result (so did she, as she passed on representing it). I returned my second version to my trusted editor Kathryn Craft, who also disliked the new version, but was able to articulate why and help me see a path to reclaiming what we both had loved about the original while addressing the remaining weaknesses.
I had embarked upon the mind-bending process of separating the wheat from the chaff when the pandemic hit and everything fell apart. Now I am inching back into it, and hope to continue once this week of camp is over.
After all, soon school will be back in session, and I will have a quiet house again.
The Circular Nature of Revision–CoronaLife Day 894
Last week I mentioned that I wanted to work on my YA scifi, Veritas, while my daughter was at camp. It turned out to be quite a productive week.
It took a couple of days to go over all my notes and get back into the swing of things, since it had been almost 2 years since I had last worked on it. But after I did, I got through 18,000 words. Some were new words, but most were revision.
This brought me almost to the halfway point of my novel. But sometimes when you revise, you hit a spot that requires going back into an earlier scene, or writing a whole new scene to insert earlier, so the current scene will make sense or have the desired emotional depth.
That’s what happened with this scene. It referred to something in passing that my editor thought needed deeper explanation earlier in the book so it would resonate more in the current scene. I agreed, so now I will be stopping my forward momentum until I write that new scene.
My editor’s attention to that particular scene also made me realize that certain events in my longer, full series, timeline did not work as written. Mostly it would have required a main character to be in two different places simultaneously. And even in a speculative fiction genre, that just didn’t work.
Therefore, I laid out my entire series timeline in a visual way, which helped me see where my time conflicts were. I then adjusted my series to make it all work. It required me to revise my thinking, too, letting go of my original idea of how things “had to be” and finding new configurations. So it turned out to be doubly good that my editor drew my attention to that scene.
Sometimes in writing you need to go backward to go forward. But since it is all necessary work, it is still progress!