Writing: With a little bit of help from my friends

Mystery Cover!

I am in the mad-dash-final-draft-edit-before-my-editor-edits-and-I-need-to-edit-the-final-version-to-publish stage of my novella. It was supposed to be ready for readers by the end of September, but unfortunately I was not able to follow my editing calendar. What is it with me and calendars? Anyway, A Demon Born will be ready by the second week of October and I look forward to many comments and reviews!

Which brings me to today's post. I can write to my heart's content, but if I want to share my work I understand that my story (while it makes perfect sense in my head) must make sense to other readers. So I would like to thank the beta readers that helped locate all sorts of character development flaws, continuity issues, and other random things I would have normally not caught on my own. And now that I have reworked nearly the entire piece and practically rewrote two whole chapters, I hope I didn't create more problems. I will leave that to my editor to decide.

I was a little stumped on a discriptive problem I was having in a scene, and so took to Facebook and Twitter to ask for inspiration:

Not easy to get responses on Twitter, especially when you have 200+ tweets coming at you every hour, but I got a couple of responses from FB and I would like to say thank you, I was inspired and you shall see your suggestions in action (if you get my novella). Again, thanks to my friends I was able to improve my writing.

I'm going to ask for more inspiration now - You walk into a cafe where the wait staff are dressed as Victorian maids and butlers. Your attention is drawn to one thing, what is it?

My goal is to create stories worth reading. First, it has to be a story worth telling, so if I don't like to tell it who's going to want to read it? But once I discover a story I feel compelled to share, I want it to be the best possible reading experience. Every writer should have a band of friends with the guts to tell you where your story went south. Or north. Winter is coming, after all. They don't need to be best friends, or even good friends, but they need to be readers.

Random thoughts on writing a prequel

Wattpad cover art

As a way to get readers interested in my first novel, I decided to write a prequel to Circles to provide a "sneak peek" for those who haven't read it yet.

So I began this creative adventure to write a short story that introduced how Solus, a main character of Circles, came to be a demon. My goal was to write a chapter a week for the next five weeks and have it available through Wattpad for readers to read and comment. Once the short story was complete, I would rework the piece and publish it in its entirety and put it up for free.

Sounds easy, right? Well just like writing 50k words in the month of November is a major feat, so is coming up with a well-written chapter in one week. My fist chapter was a nightmare. On Sunday, I first had to come up with a basic story line to follow. Then I had to figure out how to start it. By Thursday, I had enough of the chapter to get help from fellow writers in my critique group. On Saturday afternoon the first chapter was up.

But once I re-read my live chapter, I had nagging thoughts that something wasn't right. So I skimmed through my original novel and, yep, two very glaring continuity errors right there. At first I was disappointed and upset about the errors, but my goal was to generate interest, not create a new novel. And my intent was to clean it up anyway when I'm finished and formally publish it. All the mistakes I made and will make will have a chance to be fixed later. No worries.

But I was worried. All evening Saturday and all day Sunday, I obsessed over these errors. So much so that I didn't start the next chapter until Monday afternoon. I was unhappy with my published work, all because a work in progress didn't fit perfectly within the timeline of that world. I felt terrible, and entertained the thought that I should stop writing.

What this exercise in writing has done is help me realize I do not like writing prequels. It makes me second-guess my original work and think "I should have changed this" or I should have done this with that scene." I nit-picked my novel for two years before finally saying "enough." Every novel ever written could have been "perfected" in any number of ways. There has to be a moment where a writer finally says, "It's done," takes what was learned and moves on. I needed to move on.

Writing is like life. Life happens, and when things happen that you don't like, you adjust and move on. What happened in the past is "published," what happens next is the "work in progress."  But, like prequels, life can linger on the past, making it difficult to write the future. It is okay to reminisce about the past, romanticize or politicize or dramatize it as much as you like. As long as you remember the past doesn't change, and only your present and future matter.

I say that I will never write another prequel, but maybe I will. Right now, my focus in on my future. I will finish this short story and move on to another. And I will nit-pick this new one to death before I finally say, "enough" and move on. In the meantime, please look for the second chapter to come out on Wattpad this coming Saturday!