Going forward by going backward
Well, I’ve come to a decision: I need to start over on Sweet Heart Catalyst.
See, it took me forever to come up with what I have. First of all, my pesky main character had decided that he was a cop investigating a murder: a giant subject about which I Knew Nothing! (as Schultz would say) So I had to read up on that, which took (and is still taking) time.
Secondly, I tried a new thing when I was writing this story: being deliberately disorganized and un-chronological. I now have a large number of bits and snips that I wrote out of order, at different times, whenever the ideas occurred to me. I’m not saying this was a bad way to write it; it was a different approach that resulted in a lot of ideas coming to the forefront. The only problem is that with this scattershot method, I tended to lack a sense of how the story was going as a whole. I had also avoided writing a lot of the police work related scenes because, heheh, I wasn’t totally clear on what exactly they would do, and needed to learn about it first.
So now I’ve thrown all those bits and snips in a document, in rough chronological order, and I have about 20K of wordage. A lot of it is “dated”, in that, things have changed considerably, particularly with the older stuff. Rather than continue adding to the existing stew of bits, I’ve decided to start a fresh document and write it chronologically from the beginning (which is not to say that I might not fold the spacetime continuum into flashbacks later). I can still keep some of the later material, but there is a lot of earlier stuff that’s going bye-bye.
But that’s OK, because I have the bones of the story figured out, including the police scenes that were confuzzling me before. So there!
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Also, I finished the first draft of Sergio, which has been renamed Bright Light, and have sent it out to my crit group and already gotten some very useful feedback.
Mirrored from Kam Oi Lee.