Switching gears
So after finishing Oathborn last Friday I hit my first "switch gears" moment of the year. Time to work on something else. I can't get too far behind, after all.
Late last year I stopped querying The Shakespeare Thing based on some feedback from new readers one of them an agent and one of them a casual new Twitter acquaintance who expressed an interest. They both had a similar thing to say about the worldbuilding and after some consideration, I decided this was a valid point and something that needed strengthening in the manuscript.
Since the etiquette of querying assumes that you don't query until you feel your MS is "the best it can be" I stopped sending queries. However, I was still in something of a frustrated place, much like how I feel whenever I've done bumper cars at an amusement park. I loathe bumper cars. I always get stuck in the corner and can't get out and can't bump anybody because I can't make a break. Everyone else keeps bumping me back into my corner. This is how I felt at the prospect of Yet Another Tweak Pass on the Shakespeare Thing-- like I was going to be tweaking and querying it for the rest of my life and that would be the epitaph of my writing career.
The best cure I could see for breaking free of this glum was to write something else, anything else, more specifically something that was 100% mine and so I deliberately set aside the Shakespeare thing and tackled Oathborn as an upcoming Nano project.
Coming out the other side, I feel so much better about my writing life. It's really just a little shroud of a book right now, but I have something else in my grab bag.
If all goes to plan, by the end of the year I'll have even more something elses.
At any rate, the short-term game plan is to get this pass of The Shakespeare Thing handled in short order. Yesterday I wrote a new scene to kick off my re imagined approach. I counted the "new" words as best I could, but it's not easy when you're picking around words that are already there. Basically my plans for Saturday are to sit down with the entire MS and re-weave it from top to bottom with tweaks. It will be grueling, but I do think I can get it done in a weekend. And then it will be off my plate and I can get back to querying.
After that, the plan is to finally dive into a proper first draft of the Superhero Thing. It's been almost a year and a half since the initial plot bunny and it's high time we actually got some traction on the darn thing. My cohort melyanna is in agreement. I'll have a couple weeks' worth of "extra" writing to get caught back up on my year-to-date, but that's perfectly fine.
So. That's that. Now to get it done.
Late last year I stopped querying The Shakespeare Thing based on some feedback from new readers one of them an agent and one of them a casual new Twitter acquaintance who expressed an interest. They both had a similar thing to say about the worldbuilding and after some consideration, I decided this was a valid point and something that needed strengthening in the manuscript.
Since the etiquette of querying assumes that you don't query until you feel your MS is "the best it can be" I stopped sending queries. However, I was still in something of a frustrated place, much like how I feel whenever I've done bumper cars at an amusement park. I loathe bumper cars. I always get stuck in the corner and can't get out and can't bump anybody because I can't make a break. Everyone else keeps bumping me back into my corner. This is how I felt at the prospect of Yet Another Tweak Pass on the Shakespeare Thing-- like I was going to be tweaking and querying it for the rest of my life and that would be the epitaph of my writing career.
The best cure I could see for breaking free of this glum was to write something else, anything else, more specifically something that was 100% mine and so I deliberately set aside the Shakespeare thing and tackled Oathborn as an upcoming Nano project.
Coming out the other side, I feel so much better about my writing life. It's really just a little shroud of a book right now, but I have something else in my grab bag.
If all goes to plan, by the end of the year I'll have even more something elses.
At any rate, the short-term game plan is to get this pass of The Shakespeare Thing handled in short order. Yesterday I wrote a new scene to kick off my re imagined approach. I counted the "new" words as best I could, but it's not easy when you're picking around words that are already there. Basically my plans for Saturday are to sit down with the entire MS and re-weave it from top to bottom with tweaks. It will be grueling, but I do think I can get it done in a weekend. And then it will be off my plate and I can get back to querying.
After that, the plan is to finally dive into a proper first draft of the Superhero Thing. It's been almost a year and a half since the initial plot bunny and it's high time we actually got some traction on the darn thing. My cohort melyanna is in agreement. I'll have a couple weeks' worth of "extra" writing to get caught back up on my year-to-date, but that's perfectly fine.
So. That's that. Now to get it done.