Writing Update

Finally, after months of sitting on a round of comments from my beta readers, I managed to get another draft of Pack Supremacy completely edited. Hooray!

I feel a lot better about this version than I did about the previous few. This draft was a relatively major overhaul of the story. Most of the core bits stayed the same, but I dramatically increased a part of Quinn's narrative in an effort to cut down on the amount of time she spends sitting in an office moping and talking to herself. It also allowed me to cut out several scenes between her and another character that really served no purpose.

That said, I always send a draft to my betas with the same comment: "I have no idea if this is good or complete gibberish." It always seems to me like during the editing process I take everything I wrote, throw it up into the air, and hope it lands in a reasonable order. Scenes that used to be in chapter 4 now don't appear until chapter 23. That revelation that Quinn had at the end of the book is suddenly bumped up to about a third of the way through. Because I've read it so many times and I know what's supposed to be happening, I can never tell if anyone else is going to understand who's who and what's going on.

I like to think of writing like a patchwork quilt. You start out with some fabric that's pretty nice on its own, but then, in the second draft, you find other fabric that's also nice and you sew some together. Then you share it with people, and they offer suggestions as to another pattern that might work, and you add some of that. And again and again, until you have either a beautiful quilt or a clashing, misshapen array of fabric squares.

In case you're wondering, I don't quilt. So that entire paragraph might not make sense.

Anyway, this is intended as an update. What's next for me? While I wait for feedback on this draft, I'm going to do two things. The first, like I talked about a couple weeks ago, is to make a few charts and lists for The Capitoline Hill Chronicles, namely a timeline and a character list so I can stop guessing every time I need to address one of those two things.

And the second is a new project, though one I've talked about before. I'm finally going to begin seriously outlining the currently untitled story about Bex Addison. I've been tossing this plot around for a couple years now, and I'm really excited to get started working on it. I'll post more about it goes along.